A cultural row over dragon boats
By Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING - A mixture of pride and prickle pervaded China's first public celebration of Duanwu, or dragon boat festival, in over half a century.

And even as state-media reported that nine villagers had slipped from a rain-soaked embankment to their deaths while watching the races on Sunday, others around China found themselves torn over the festival's newly found commercialization and reinterpreted cultural value.

After seeing it excoriated by the country's communist leaders and then appropriated by South Korea - which recently claimed it as its own intangible cultural heritage - the festival has been given an enthusiastic revival by the nation's cultural trendsetters.

Last year, government officials decided to revamp the country's holiday schedule to focus on traditional festivals at the expense of the Marxist May Day celebration. The dragon boat festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar, was one of three traditional Chinese festivals that were added as official public holidays.

But since the original festival celebrated the patriotism and dissenting spirit of Chinese intelligentsia, many intellectuals are unhappy with China's modern renditions of it, heavily weighted toward the rituals instead of its meaning.

"To revive Chinese culture, the first thing to do is to revive the courage with which the ancient Chinese people pursued freedom and restore the glorious traditions of our ancestors: the pursuit of freedom and willingness to die rather than submit to tyranny," said an online petition signed by 12 Chinese academics on the eve of the festival, June 8.

The festival commemorates the patriotic self-sacrifice of poet Qu Yuan, a minister of the Chu Kingdom during the Warring States period (475-221 BC). Qu Yuan drowned himself in a river to defend his political ideals and mourn the demise of his kingdom. Folk history holds that local people were so stricken by his death that they paddled out on boats to attempt to retrieve his body and threw rice buns into the river to tempt the fish away from eating it.

After the communist victory of 1949, Qu Yuan has been depicted as both patriotic hero opposed to foreign domination and a man of conscience who put his ideals above his loyalty to the ruler of the day. But as China slipped into the chaos of radical political campaigns in the 1960s, government leaders preferred to forget about Qu Yuan's dissenting spirit and the festival fell into decline.

The petitioners do not deny that Qu Yuan had a patriotic side, but believe that another side, his desire for freedom and his refusal to submit to tyranny, has been obscured and diluted.

Much the same happened to all folk customs and traditional culture, which chairman Mao Zedong saw as remnants of an old feudal world that he wanted to destroy. In the heyday of communist ideology he ordered the annihilation of everything old - from marriages to funerals, to folk medicine and folk music.

But as communist ideology gradually lost its influence in contemporary society, Chinese leaders after him have tried to fill the void with nationalistic appeals for people to take pride in the country's 5,000- year-old history and culture. Using traditional festivals as rallying points for patriotism has served external purposes too. In recent years Beijing has grown worried about other countries encroaching on China's cultural heritage.

In 2005, China saw the dragon boat festival nominated and later successfully listed as an intangible cultural heritage of neighboring South Korea.

While Korean cultural officials have never denied the Chinese origins of the festival, they insist that the inscribed Dan-je festival of the Korean town of Gangneung is a distinctive local variation, which had developed along its own lines for more than a millennium and more. The Korean festival is famous for its masked dramas and shamanistic ritual performances. Celebrations last for five days and draw thousands of tourists.

Much to the chagrin of many intellectual circles, China's own revival of the festival has centered almost entirely on holding dragon boat races, seen as the re-enactment of the search for the drowned poet, and on the eating of traditional rice treats.

Zongzi - the glutinous rice buns wrapped in bamboo leaves - have become the highlight of Duanwu celebrations in the cities where astute merchants have sought to capitalize on people's nostalgia for their much-neglected festival traditions.

Merchants have been quick to seize on the designation of the festival as a national holiday this year, flooding stores and supermarkets with countless varieties of the rice treats. Many elderly Beijingers - long accustomed to preparing the buns at home - have seen their home-made goods shunned by the youngsters eager to try the more exotic varieties offered at the shops.

"It is no longer about eating because it is a tradition but because of craving new things all the time," grumbles Zhang Fang, whose daughter no longer likes her home-made zongzi filled with Chinese jujube.

Along with the traditional zongzi stuffed with crushed red beans and meat, sellers are offering rice buns stuffed with delicacies like goose liver, abalone and shark's fin. Some have even come up with zongzi shaped like the Olympic torch, naming their offerings "Torch Zongzi". Others have put forward zongzi in the shape of the five Olympic mascots.

To some these examples of infusing the festive treat with nationalistic meaning illustrate the problem with government-mandated efforts to revive traditional culture.

"We are already engaged in one battle - with commercialization - to keep the true ways of old traditions," says Wu Xiaoling, a media worker who reports on cultural issues. "It is hard enough to fight businesses' urge to look at traditions as money-making machines. But it is even harder to fight these interpretations of the festivals, which serve only the needs of the day."

"We do not deny that Qu Yuan had a patriotic side, but we believe that another side, his desire for freedom and his refusal to submit to tyranny, has been obscured and diluted," said the online declaration on the Duanwu festival, drafted by Beijing scholar Ling Cangzhou and signed by other liberal academics.

In their petition the intellectuals suggested that China should increase ordinary people's exposure to the ancient sage's historical deeds by printing his image on the notes of Chinese yuan, which currently feature only chairman Mao Zedong.

(Inter Press Service)