Chinese/Lunar New Year are both wrong, now what?

It’s that time of the year again, when nationalists all around the world start debating if it should be Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year, completely ignoring the fact that both terms are equally problematic. Let’s just admit that we’ll never have a settlement on this but just for the fun of it, I did a SWOT analysis of the two terms.

Trigger alert: This is not going to be politically correct on both sides (but of course, I clearly have a more preferred side, I state my conflict of interest here).

CURRENT TERMS SWOT ANALYSIS

TEAM CHINESE NEW YEAR

Strength: Congratulations! You are 100% right in technicalities but you’d be gaslighted seen as being not inclusive towards the other non-Chinese communities who also celebrate this day as their New Year EVEN if you are saying it to a Chinese person. Sorry but the world has long moved on from a Chinese-centric one and now hates you at the moment so you can be right, but you won’t be loved.

Weakness: You don’t even have the buy in of your own people. The Chinese in China don’t call it Chinese New Year– it’s a term the West has developed for Chinese diasporas.

And there are many self-loathing Chinese around so… if your own people can’t support you unanimously on this, you’re not gonna win this war.

Also, nobody cares if it’s Chinese or not, they don’t even care if the term Chinese isn’t referring to modern China which is what they are truly anti. They just want to celebrate and eat with the ancient Chinese-derived chopsticks which doesn’t have the word Chinese in it so they don’t need to be reminded of their ancestral trauma of being vassal states and the threats of modern China.

Also, your kids outgrow you, so they have developed their own calculation while you age. In fact, some years, they don’t even celebrate their new year the same date as your! Forcing them to come back for reunion dinner together would be disastrous.

Opportunity: You can use this opportunity to remind everyone that you used to be the superpower before the West came into the picture, and that’s how everyone in your power of influence went by your calendar. You can try to invite them to Xiaohongshu (Red Note) like the refugees of Tiktok did. Or boost Chinese tourism by visiting the Purple Mountain Observatory where you calculate the current calendar. You could also craft a tour package for visitors to Beijing to learn about the stories of the German Jesuit Adam Schall and his work at the Beijing Ancient Observatory, the catholic church he lived in, and his final resting place.

Threat: You can definitely choose to be like Giordano Bruno and keep telling people that the Earth indeed revolves around the Sun, just that you need to accept that you will be burnt at the stake (RIP). The general global trend is pretty sensi and anti-Chinese, so going on and on about how everyone used to be subservient to you at a period when everyone is going on about decolonisation isn’t going to be that great an idea huh?

TEAM LUNAR NEW YEAR

Strength: Congratulations! You barely passed for getting it 50% right! Not the A+ Student that Asians would love, but definitely the super popular kid on the block! You have the rest of Asia minus the non-self-loathing Chinese diasporas and China Chinese on your side! Who cares about grades when you can be popular!

Weakness: Well, the bottle is half full or half empty depending on how narcissistic you are! Not much of an achievement since it’s attainable with a flip on either side of the coin. It’s basically a poorly coiled term by the West to describe the lunisolar calendar that the Chinese developed that takes into account the movement of BOTH the Sun (solar) and the Moon (lunar). The current calendar is a reformed one by a German Jesuit and was officially put in place in the Qing dynasty Manchurian-ruled China in 1644. One more word from you saying everyone has their own lunar calendar in retaliation, and you’re going to write the word “Lunisolar” 100,000 times.

Opportunity: Now that the time has called for it, even though you aren’t an A+ kid, you should still step up to the challenge and innovate a new calendar that takes into account the movement of the universe (idea!) and call it your own! What a legacy you could create! This is what we call the Blue Ocean Strategy!

Or, you could gaslight the West instead, to acknowledge the actual term you have been calling it in your own culture instead of lumping the entire group as “Lunar” people. That would be lunatic.

Of course, different Sinosphere areas have developed their own calendar that are offspring from the Chinese ones, so let’s wait patiently for the year when the dates are not the same, and we can tell the world SEE, we are NOT the same! The term “Lunar New Year” will not age well…

Threat: None. You have the whole non-Chinese world behind you. There’s no threat to an anglo-centric view point in this modern time and age. Who cares about facts and non-specificities when everyone’s busy fighting childhood trauma.

MY HUMBLE SUGGESTION

Since nobody can agree on a term that the West can easily print out to send to their Asian communities on greeting cards or on emails, maybe we can just call it Spring Festival? It’s like how nobody is disputing the naming of Mid-Autumn Festival and Dragon Boat Festival, because it is merely descriptive and neutral. And these are terms that the Chinese are using (kinda).

And also just some food for thought, would we ever call English, alphabetish? Cos many people who speak the language as native speakers are not, well, English. So to be more inclusive, in the name of parity, could we be more descriptive about the language than to state its origin?

Yes. This is definitely a case of whataboutism.