Independent Researcher

Thesis Title: The Cultural Foundations for China Taking over Christmas

About

Christmas have become one of the most popular holidays in Hong Kong, Taipei, and most cities in the Mainland China. The introduction of the feast day in the Chinese society contains as much political significance as it have done in Europe and American since the fourth century up to now. Christmas has been an arena of class struggle in Hong Kong since it became a British colony in the end of nineteenth century. Christmas has been a platform for politician to launch nationalist propaganda in Taiwan since the martial law ended in the island. Christmas is an outcome of Deng Xiaoping's program of economic reform (or the collapse of socialism) in the Mainland China. The festive season, which provokes a call of both enjoyment and charity, is not only influential in modern Chinese history, but also a key to understand the contemporary conditions of Chinese societies.

It is not exaggerated to say that many people in China are live to work for Christmas. Today, there are thousands of manufacturers of Christmas ornaments in Southern China, where provides jobs for migrant works for all over China. All the artificial Christmas trees Walmart sells worldwidely are made in Shenzhen. Sara Bongiorni, an American journalist, cautiously discusses if “China [is] taking over Christmas” in one of  her best selling book A Year without Made in China, since it seems to be very hard to celebrate Christmas without made in China goods. Bongiorni’s anxiety reveals the fact that the fetishism of commodities always collude with the fantasy of Christmas.

In the Chinese societies, politicians manage to manipulate political rhetoric during Christmas while retailers and manufacturers struggle for their profits. On the other hand, young people’s sexual desire is provoked. Although the political significances of Christmas are differences in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China, there is one trend in common among the Chinese societies: more and more people, particularly the younger generations, regard Christmas Eve as a occasion for virgins to have the first sex. 

In the thesis, the cultural logic that provides grounds to let the phenomena mentioned above juxtapose at the same time is to be examined. Christmas become popular in the Chinese societies as the capitalist hegemony has been established in the Twentieth Century. Both the calculating rationality of the bourgeois class and the irrational sexuality of the youth shape people’s imagination of the festive season. Christmas fantasy, which includes both utilitarian asceticism and sexual desire, reveals a cultural contradiction of capitalism.

As Christmas in the West contains a strong moral significance and apparently is not an initiation of sexual enjoyment, the fest day rather signifies a call of charity (rather than a social change or revolution), which is derived by bourgeois sense of guilty against the social disadvantages as Charles Dickens describes in A Christmas Carol.

Although Sexual desire is repressed during Christmas in the West, the representations of the feast day in some European and American novels (e.g. Cuentos eroticos de Navidad by various authors), television episodes (e.g. Six Feet Under [series 1, season 1]) and films (e.g. Rod Hardy’s December Boys) betray the asceticism. These works associated Christmas with sexuality reveal a fact that sexuality has some kind of hidden significance in the West. The perfect example of explaining the ambiguity between asceticism and desire with which Christmas associated is the film Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life: students who are bored when the teacher and his wife demonstrate how to have an intercourse and eventually they all go to the Haven of Christmas.

No matter what the difference of people celebrating Christmas, I argue that the variety of celebrations between the West and the Chinese societies are indeed derived by the same fantasy of Christmas which generates a sense of lack of enjoyment. 

In my thesis, how the festive season becomes a fantasy, and at the same time a nightmare, is to be explicated by reviewing the representations of Christmas in films, literary works, news coverages, advertisement jingles and historical documents. The representations of Christmas, both in the West and the Chinese societies, support the ideology in which both the absence and the presence of sexual desire are indeed directed by the fantasy of Christmas. 

The history of Christmas reveals that the feast day, which apparently celebrates the birthday of Jesus Christ when it is not indeed, is one of the perfect examples of explaining how the representations override the reality. As the fantasy of Christmas, derived from the representations, tells people how to desire by informing them their enjoyments are missing, or they are not really enjoying, the fantasy plays an important role to support the ideological formation which forbids and at the same time command the enjoyments of the festive season.

Another task of my thesis, a work of a combination of ethnography and semiotics, is to compare how the West and the Chinese societies deal with the repressed sexual desire and originate a variety of social phenomena. By the comparison, the cultural foundations for “China taking over Christmas” are to be demonstrated. It is also to explain that irrational excess and cultural contradiction, rather than calculating rationality as Adam Smith and Max Weber argues, indeed plays a more important role in shaping capitalist ideology.