Chinese New Year from a Chinese Prospective

To celebrate the Chinese New Year I asked one of my Chinese office employees, Shang, to write a little bit about his experience with the holiday. Hope you enjoy!

The New Year is the most important festival for the Chinese people. Also called the Spring Festival, it is not fixed on the Gregorian calendar but always falls on the first day of the first lunar month. According to state regulations the holiday lasts the first seven days of the New Year, but the traditional length, and the one most people follow, is that the holiday ends after the fifteenth day. During the New Year holiday everyone will travel to go visit their families – not only their parents but their more extended family – their aunts, uncles and in-laws.

The largest effect the Chinese New Year has on the Western World is that manufacturing and shipping is at a stand still for three to four weeks to allow time for the population to travel great distances, celebrate and return to work. There are three main factors for this:

1. The economic development in China is fairly uneven. The east and south of the country are much more developed while the north and west are more rural. Consequently many people have flocked to these developed areas to find a good job.
2. The sheer size of the Chinese population. A large city like Shenzhen or Beijing has ten to forty million people living there.
3. Public transportation. The logistics of having millions of people all traveling at the same times is monumental. People will travel by bus, train or plane, paying sometimes as much as a plane ticket from China to America just to travel within China. The time it takes everyone to travel home and then travel back to work stretches the holiday from seven days to almost a full month.

Happy Chinese New Year everybody!