We’ve mentioned the controversial status of egg fried rice in China. Now Asia Media Centre reminds us that “Even Santa is political—China’s battle over festivals” (December 10, 2024).
Echoing Xi Jinping’s repeated calls since 2014 to bolster “cultural confidence,” local authorities, schools, and universities have issued directives to ban Christmas celebrations. Red-and-green decorations are ordered removed, Christmas-themed advertising censored, and Santa and his reindeer banished from malls.
However, with no nationwide directive from the central government to ban Christmas, these prohibitions remain localised and ad hoc, unable to stifle the strong commercial drive to celebrate the holiday….
A more sophisticated approach than banning Christmas is to redefine it. For years, loyalists of the Communist Party of China (CCP) have advocated “Maomas”, celebration of the birth of Mao Zedong on 26 December. Jesus is not our saviour, they argue; Mao is—he saved China from imperialism, colonialism, poverty, and capitalist oppression.
Promotion of Maomas doesn’t seem a heck of a lot more sophisticated way of killing Christmas than simply banning celebration of it outright. Especially since the glorification of Mao as savior depends on ignoring the murderous devastation that he wrought while in power, actions described in many works. (For example, see Frank Dikötter’s The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao’s Great Famine, and The Cultural Revolution; or the brief account in Paul Johnson’s Modern Times.)
Halloween has not been safe from crackdown fever either.
In the wake of the 2022 “White Paper Revolution”—a rare nationwide protest against strict COVID policies and censorship—young people found creative ways to mock the government during Halloween 2023. Costumes such as surveillance cameras and all-white COVID testers wielding giant cotton swabs flouted authority. This October, Shanghai authorities cracked down preemptively, deploying heavy police to patrol the streets. Officers arrested revellers and stripped away costumes and makeup.
The CCP, party pooper.
