By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Jan 20 2004 (IPS)

Lavish Lunar New Year rituals once shunned as feudal superstitions are coming back to life in communist China, spurred by government incentives to encourage consumer spending and keep the economy humming.

Piles of intricate gold and red paper cutouts and calligraphic drawings cram thousands of stalls across this sprawling capital. Hundreds of miniature orange trees – synonymous with the arrival of spring – line the flower markets in clear defiance of the chilly weather in this northern city. Strings of bright red lanterns – big and small, cotton and silk – hang above the gates of supermarkets in dazzling displays.

Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, marks the first day of the Chinese lunar calendar and usually occurs somewhere between January 20 and February 20. It is observed throughout the global Chinese Diaspora and in countries including Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

This year’s celebrations are to take place on Thursday, January 22.

At the high-end decoration shop Shang Pin, sets of gold ingots made of plastic – imitations of the bullion bars used in the Ming and Qing dynasties – are on offer and salesgirls say that business is brisk.

Communist China may have condemned wealthy landowners as feudal exploiters in the past but replicas of their gold ingots are now associated with generating fortune and good luck. On display throughout the city are nostalgia for everything from the past and a desire to match the glitter of Christmas.

As the world’s leading producer of toys and Christmas decorations, China is now waking up to the potential of tapping into domestic demand for Lunar New Year celebrations in once spurned, traditional ways.

”Look at these ‘hong bao’,” said Zhi Yali, a worker at Shang Pin. She referred to red envelopes ornamented with gold characters for spring and used to hold New Year gifts of money for children. ”They are made of fine paper and look so beautiful that there is an immediate urge to buy some. Nothing like the previous years when the ritual of hong bao existed only in the sayings of old people.”

This year’s Lunar New Year in particular draws comparisons with Christmas as it comes hardly a month after the Christian festivities, which also enjoy increasing consumer popularity here.

”Business over Chinese New Year can’t compare with business over Christmas,” scoffed Zhang Huai, who sells ribbons, carved present boxes and gold wrapping paper at the Yansha flower market. ”Young people want to celebrate Western festivals, they want to be seen as fashionable and this means everybody in our business makes a lot of money.”

The government, however, is trying to buoy Chinese New Year with incentives to make people spend.

In recent years, authorities have decreed three weeklong annual holidays, hoping that free time and rising levels of disposable income would encourage people to spend at the shops and on travel – and keep afloat domestic demand, a key component of China’s economic growth.

The government estimates that 1.89 billion journeys will be made this month as the world’s most populous nation welcomes the year of the Monkey. While the majority would be visits by migrant workers and students to their rural homes, many newly rich couples are expected to board planes for exotic destinations abroad.

Heeding government’s appeal to entice people to spend, cultural officials also have given their blessings to the revival of the temple fair in Beijing.

Most of ancient Beijing’s 2,500 temples have been destroyed amid political campaigns against religion or have been gobbled in the city’s frenzy to develop a modern skyline. Those that remain would vie to attract thousands of visitors by staging acrobatics, Peking opera, lion dances, snake charming, stilt-walking and offering themselves to the populace as venues for drinking, eating and shopping over this year’s week-long holiday.

All visitors pay entrance fees ranging between 6 yuan (72 cents) and 10 yuan (1.20 dollars). Temples such as Ditan, or the Temple of Earth, are hoping to boost ticket sales by staging what a few decades ago would have been unthinkable – a re-enactment of the imperial procession in which the emperor arrived at the temple to worship the God of Earth.

”It is not the real thing, of course,” says Zhang Jinming, a university graduate in Chinese folklore. ”But the government realizes they have to come up with a substitute for banning many other things, like firecrackers, for example.”

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