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RECONSRUCTING TIME: CALENDRICAL REFORM IN CHINA
1911-PRESENT
HAIMING YAN
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Abstract
This paper examines three waves of calendrical reform in modern China since 1911.
I argue that the imposition of the Gregorian calendar represents a dynamical
relationship between Chinese national identity and temporality. It reveals that an
institutional transformation of the calendrical system is to a great extent culturally
and cognitively determined. During the Republican era, the Gregorian calendar
involved two contrasting implications: being Chinese and being western, which
encountered resistances from the society. The Nationalist Party failed to integrate
these two discourses into a schematic narrative system because the party’s own
definition of the nation was inherently paradoxical and inconsistent. However, the
Gregorian calendar was more compatible during the socialist era in that the
Communist Party transcended this dichotomy between “Chinese” and “western” by
establishing a universalistic and cosmopolitan narrative of the nation. This narrative
conceptualized the calendar as part of the revolutionary process.
Also, since late 20th century, there has been a revival of Chinese traditional holidays.
Public consciousness of Chinese traditional calendar has risen in accordance with the
increasing passion about the nation’s past. This transition represents a new mode of
integration of Chinese perceptions of time and identity, as well as a dissolving
boundary between the Gregorian calendar and the Chinese calendar.
Calendars in China
The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar one, systematically consisting of both
elements from a lunar calendar and a solar calendar. One month of the Chinese calendar is
based on one cycle of the moon, while it uses leap months to correct for its deviation from the
astronomical year. This Chinese lunisolar calendar could be dated back to 500 BCE, and had
been officially employed until the Republican Revolution in 1911.
However, although the state and state-run organizations have been employing the
Gregorian calendar since 1911, contemporary China is still temporally organized by two
different systems of calendar: the Gregorian calendar, and the Chinese calendar. Most
traditional holidays are being practiced and celebrated based on the old calendar. This
coexistence of temporal systems has engendered difficulties in particular circumstances. For
example, the winter break for each school year is determined by the date of the Chinese New
Year, which varies between Jan 21 and Feb 19. If the Chinese new year arrives early in a year,
the winter break should be scheduled early, which in turn shortens the length of the fall
semester.
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In spite of some conflicts, these seemingly unpractical temporal systems have been
practiced in contemporary China in a smoothly effective way. As indicated in this paper,
this coexistence may be a combined consequence of the Nationalist Party’s failure to
eradicate the old calendar and the Communist Party’s success of integrating the two systems.
Why did the Nationalist Party fail? Why did the Communist Party succeed? In this paper, I
will review three waves of the calendrical reform in modern China. Established with
Zerubavel’s argument that calendar and commemorative holidays attached with the calendar
promote the formation of national identity (1981; 2004), this paper extends his thesis by
adding that the way people adopt, perceive and practice the calendar is mutually shaped by
the nature of their national identity.
I find that the Gregorian calendar has been characterized by the Chinese people in three
categories alongside the reform processes: western, cosmopolitan, and Chinese. First,
people during the Republican era rejected the Gregorian calendar in that it entailed a western
feature that contrasted with their Chinese consciousness. Then the Communists succeeded
in establishing a schematic discourse that interpreted the Gregorian calendar as a
cosmopolitan one, which was consistent with the authoritarian political atmosphere.
Nowadays, the third wave of the calendrical reform reflects a dissolving boundary between
the Gregorian calendar and the Chinese calendar, both of which have been understood by the
Chinese people as integral parts of their temporal system.
Calendar and Identity
Calendar is one important message conveying how a community conceptualizes “the
dimension of time, and hence, of ‘making sense’ of an important facet of human lived
experience” (Stern 2001: v). As Durkheim writes, “a calendar expresses the rhythm of the
collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity” (1965:
23). Besides the function of social solidarity, a calendar also expresses how a community
attaches meanings to its temporal circle (Zerubavel 1981: 82). Additionally, a calendar also
functions as an embodiment of an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). Mnemonic
practices have an inevitable affinity with this calendrical coincidence. Calendar also functions
in shaping the social organization of memory (Connerton 1989).
Social groups use the calendrical means to highlight their distinctiveness vis-à-vis other
groups. This establishment of intergroup boundaries, in consequence, facilitates basic patterns
of group members’ perceptions and narratives of their past as well as their commemorative
activities. A distinctive temporal regularity, according to Zerubavel, is one of the most
important underlying themes distinguishing one group from another. The calendar is the “first
major institution that man invented in order to establish and maintain temporal regularity”
(1982: 31). Furthermore, holidays embodies a certain calendar. They highlight the
significant sites of the “temporal map” and reproduce what Nora (1989) calls social “sites” of
memory (lieux de memoire). “The holiday cycle itself constitutes a traditional site of
memory, anchored in a centuries-old tradition” (Y Zerubavel, 1995: 216). And they ensure
the “mnemonic synchronization” (Zerubavel 1996) for mnemonic communities. In sum,
holidays provide commemorative settings reflecting and reconstructing the past.
Hence, a calendrical reform is an approach employed by a regime to develop and
maintain its legitimacy, especially when a new regime is attempting to draw a break from its
past regimes and from other groups. Mohammed’s calendrical reform to replace the Arab
lunisolar calendar with a new lunar calendar, for example, was an obvious case to segregate
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the Moslems from non-Moslems. By the same token, the calendrical dissociation of Easter
from Passover was an early attempt to promote the social segregation of Christians from Jews
(Zerubavel 1982).
By the same token, failures of calendrical reforms may generate more implications to our
understanding the dialects of calendar. One example was the French Republican calendrical
reform of 1793. As Zerubavel (1981) concludes, the reform failed since it disorganized the
society’s anchored temporal regularity based on temporally religious circles.
The Soviet reform of calendar and its failure was more revealing. In 1929, a radical
reform of the calendar was undertaken in Soviet Russia. “The Communist authorities
abolished both the Julian calendar, used by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the official
Gregorian calendar that had been installed by Lenin” (Achelis 1954). Instead, a new calendar
was introduced. All religious festivals and holy days were replaced by five national public
holidays associated with the revolutionary events. This calendar was named the “Eternal
Calendar.”
The major objective of this new calendar was to increase industrial production.
Nevertheless, it was too unrealistic to exert because such a reform would cause real hardship
to family life. After several years of trial, in 1931, this calendar was replaced by another
system which introduced a new week of six days wherein the rest-day came regularly on the
6th, 12th, 18th, 24th and 30th of the month. However, from 1940 the Gregorian calendar
with its seven-day week was reestablished by the central government, which returned to the
idea of Lenin. Russia was once more using the same calendar as “all the civilized countries of
the world” (Achelis 1954, also in Zerubavel 1981: 27-44).
As Zerubavel (1981) suggests, these reforms failed to gain social supports because it
entirely obliterated the old temporal order, entirely secularized the society, and entirely
ignored the cognitive condition on a global context. Analogous with Zerubavel’s findings,
the case of the Chinese calendrical reform, both its failure and success, reveals a somewhat
interesting fact. A calendrical reform may at first fail but eventually succeed, depending on
both contextual changes and textual path-dependence.
China’s Calendrical Reform: from Rejection to Integration
The calendrical reform in China reflects two main similarities with its French and
Russian counterparts. First, they are all based on the ideology that entails the discourse of
teleological, progressive development, thereby marking a boundary between a new state and
the past. Second, all of these three reforms encountered a wide and strong resistance from the
society. Whereas the French and Soviet reforms eventually ceased, the Gregorian calendar
has been finally integrated into the Chinese temporal frame. In the following part, three
waves of the calendrical reform since 1911 are examined: 1) the Nationalist era from 1911 to
1949, 2) the Communist era from 1949 to 1979, and 3) the Reform era since 1979. These
three waves are associated with three different types of national identity that the regimes
attempted to establish: 1) the modern Chinese, 2) the Socialist Chinese, and 3) the cultural
Chinese. The establishment of a new calendar, by and large, is highly associated with the
characteristics of national identity.
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1: Nationalist: New and Chinese (1911-1949)
In 1911, the Republican Revolution took place in China and took over the Manchu
regime. The new nation, the Republic of China, was primarily established by
western-educated elites, intellectuals and their military allies. Although the centralist
paradigm of this revolution was to establish a pure Chinese nation, its basic ideological
discourse and administrative system were mainly developed and maintained by western
models. The new government was entitled the National Government, explicitly implying the
nature of the government as the representative for the Chinese people. Similar to the French
and Soviet revolutions, the new authorities employed a series of policies to eliminate every
essential aspect of the old regime, including the old Chinese calendar that had used for
thousands of years. The Gregorian calendar was introduced and legitimized as the only
official calendar. The temporary president of the Republic Sun Yat-sen demanded the
implement of the Gregorian calendar at his inauguration.1 Accordingly, traditional holidays
regulated by the Chinese calendar were marginalized as “unofficial” and characterized as
“feudal remains.”
On September 24th, 1912, lawmakers passed the proposal for the National Day on
October 10th. The congress also designated some other memorial days as national holidays.
By 1929, there had been 28 public holidays, most of which were derived from revolutionary
events. On the National Day in each year, celebrations were held nationally and students were
organized to participate in marches. The concepts of march, public commemoration and
political speech became common to the Chinese people. Considering the nature of political,
social and cultural transitions, the national government did not fully abandon celebrations for
old holidays in the very beginning (Sun 1982: 53-54).
As Prasenjit Duara (1995) observes, the introduction of the Gregorian calendar
constituted and represented the establishment of a linear historicity and its association with
the nation-state. The Gregorian calendar served as a symbolism that represented a kind of
modern sense of citizenship. The progressive rhetoric implied by the new calendar received
certain degree of resonance from the public. Some people acknowledged the calendar and
practiced it. A diarist Liu Dapeng, in a delightful narrative, recorded his family’s celebration
for the Gregorian New Year in 1929 by eating meat dumplings (Harrison 2001: 201).
However, besides the resonances, resistances were even stronger. Most ordinary people
were reluctant to accept this new temporal frame. They were still living with the old calendar
and celebrating old holidays. The imposition of the solar calendar might be the most widely
resented reform during that time. It was, to some extent, only effective within the
administrative sphere. The resentments emerged from rural and urban areas, as well as from
profit and non-profit occupations.
The new temporal frame was hardly supported by businessmen, whose basic economic
activities were closely tied to the cycle of the lunar year. This was because the three main
holidays in the old calendar – the Chinese New Year, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the
Mid-Autumn Festival were also the settlement dates for all debts. A debate about whether to
convert to the Gregorian calendar occurred in Hangzhou’s chamber of commerce.2 Debaters
eventually acknowledged the difficulty to simultaneously be a citizen to comply with the new
calendar, and be a businessman to practice the Chinese lunar calendar. In fact, the implement
of one calendar not only reflected people’s temporal regularity, but also constituted their
status and membership in the community vis-à-vis the others. Therefore, since most people
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were involved in more than one group in a transforming society, a variety of communities
gave those multi-status people a strong dilemma in terms of their temporal cognition and
pattern. In addition, rural residents, as recorded by Liu Dapeng on his visit to a local town,
expressed indifferences for the new calendar. They continued practicing the old holidays
(Harrison 2001: 201).
Ironically, this civic resentment was even stronger among administrative members. An
author and school teacher Lao She expressed his hard time on the lunar New Year Eve: when
his elderly mother was waiting for the family reunion for the whole day, he had to comply
with the solar calendar and only had a couple of hours to visit his mother. As he stated, his
mother was silent when he finally returned home and he, more miserly, was tearing.
The Nationalist Party did not acknowledge the social roots of these resistances.
According to the government, however, these resistances resulted from people’s ignorance
and backward ideas. The authorities assumed that people would adopt the new calendar once
their thoughts had been framed in the progressive narrative. Therefore, on May.7, 1928, the
Department of Internal Affairs proposed a project to fully abandon the old calendar:
Over the past ten years, our citizens’ daily lives are still based on the old calendar …
there is a huge disparity between the policy and the social practice. It would be a
humiliation of the state’s reputation and status in the world if this discrepancy continues.
3
Thus, the state designed eight prepositions to fundamentally eradicate the old calendar.
Two years later, the government expanded its propaganda. It published a book named Fengsu
Gaige Yekan (Reform of the Folk Culture) in 1930, which sharply criticized the old calendar
and its holidays as “old and dirty habits.” New holidays were accordingly acclaimed as
advanced and progressive:
Dear Revolutionary Fellow Citizens,
Since the National Government established the Gregorian calendar, we have heard that
some comrades are still practicing the old calendar, continuing expecting and actively
preparing for the old New Year. These acts unintentionally inhibited the development of
our country. Therefore, we have to say something to correct this mistake.4
In spite of the series of attempts, the Gregorian calendar still failed to be incorporated
into the Chinese temporal consciousness. Folk holidays continued to be practiced and
celebrated. Admitting this failure, in 1934, the government gave in. It acknowledged the
durability of the celebrations for old holidays (Wu and Ruan, 2000), and stop the attempt to
eradicate the old calendar. Since then, there has been the coexistence between the official
Gregorian calendar and the old lunar calendar.5
According to Zerubavel (1981), the implement of a new calendar must be little
renounced when it failed to fit people’s fundamental sense of temporal regularity. More
importantly, regarding the association between calendar and national identity, the Nationalist
regime was trying to integrate two contradictory discourses of national identity together: 1) to
be Chinese, and 2) to be “modern”. But the authorities failed to differentiate being modern
from being western, whereby the rhetorical modernity entailed in this narrative was
inevitably intertwined with the representation of the West. In this context, problems
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occurred not because of the imposition of the new calendar, but due to the attempt to
eradicate the old one. It was a dilemma to establish a collective identity that entails both
newness and Chinese, especially when the traditional way of family reunion was abandoned
on traditional holidays.
In fact, holding a Chinese identity with a western calendrical system reflected another
dilemma. Liu Dapeng, for instance, depicted the new state as a “foreign system of
government, the solar calendar and foreign costume” (1990: 175). Using foreign symbols
and manners to facilitate a national identity rejected the culturally elaborated sense of
nationhood and unmistakably separated the new elite from the masses. The calendrical reform
had not only challenged people’s fundamental temporal regularity, but also disconnected their
affinity with their Chinese characteristics. Simply put, the failure was rooted at the very
beginning. The Nationalist Party attempted to promote a Chinese identity with a calendar
perceived as a western symbol, whereas the two discourses were implicitly and exclusively
inconsistent.
2: Socialist Chinese (1949-1979)
After the Communist Party took over the mainland, it discarded most policies of the
Nationalist Party. However, the Gregorian calendar was retained. The socialist regime also
used the calendar to establish its legitimacy and a national identity. But this identity differed
from the previous “modern and Chinese.” Rather, it was characterized as the “Socialist new
Chinese.” When associated with the socialist discourse, the concept of Chinese is not
confined within a territorial limit. Instead, it articulated a cosmopolitan implication. The
socialist Chinese was regarded as an advanced dimension of national consciousness in that it
did not only define Chinese citizens’ national status, but also provided them a leading role for
the world’s socialist revolutions. This identity was effectively established and maintained in
the commemoration of national holidays, the seven-day’s weekly circle, as well as even
traditional holidays. Rather than disconnect people’s ties from the past, the socialist regime
incorporated the past into a present narrative. The implement of the Gregorian calendar was
consequently successful with the establishment of the socialist identity.
The National Day
The Nationalist Party’s holidays were replaced by new ones that involved major
commemorative events for the Communist movement, especially the National Day on the 1st
of October since 1949. In spite of the opposite ideologies between the Communists and the
Nationalists, political actors in both parties were using same strategies and patterns of
concepts and narratives to diffuse new symbols for the nation. For example, the National Day
was commemorated seriously by both of them. In the Nationalist era, ordinary people
assembled on that day to express their affection to the nation. The Communist National Day,
similarly, had been annually celebrated until early 1970s. People assembled everywhere to
show their affection to the beloved Chairman Mao as well as the socialist China. The
National Day, to a great extent, would be meaningless without its affiliation with the ideology
of socialism.
Week
The concept of week is “an artificial rhythm that was created by human beings totally
independently of any natural periodicity” (Zerubavel 1985: 4). Perhaps the most significant
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part of the Gregorian calendar’s implementation in China was the wide adoption of the
seven-day’s week circle. Because of the totalitarianism in agricultural, industrial, educational
and commercial spheres, the newly established socialist country was temporally organized in
this coherent and integral mechanism. Different from the nationwide resistances during the
Republican period, the Chinese people began to express their supports for this new temporal
system. The socialist Chinese people learnt how to accommodate their temporal rhythms to
the seven-day’s circle in that they saw this circle as a representation of the advancement of
socialism.
Mass media and folk arts represented the calendrical transformation. For example, Hou
Baolin, a famous Chinese stand-up comedian in the 1950s, performed a comedy which
depicted a lower-level staff who was always dreaming of dancing with girls on weekends.
The word “weekends” was the most frequent one during the play. This comedy revealed that
Chinese people’s temporal framework had already been organized by the language of “week.”
The socialist Chinese’s familiarity with the distinction between weekdays and weekend was a
representation and reinforcement of their understanding of the meaning of work for socialism.
In fact, this comedy intended to despise the staff’s lazy personality that affected his
contribution to the socialist construction. This example unmistakably indicated that the
seven-day’s weekly rhythm was strongly attached and incorporated to the Socialist narratives.
By and large, the imposition of the seven-day’s weekly circle was successful because of
the people’s conformity to the state’s temporal discourse. Working on weekdays and
entertaining with comrades on weekends illustrated an ideal model of the socialist life style.
Traditional Holidays
The most compelling strategy that the socialist regime created was that rather than
eradicate the old temporal system, they incorporated it into the new calendar with a socialist
discourse.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese New Year and other old holidays were
regarded as symbolic representations of the feudalist hangovers. There were “Four Olds,” i.e.
Old Custom, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas (see Spence, 2001: 575). In order to
eliminate these Four Olds, the government abandoned numerous practices that were tied to
the past, including the celebrations for traditional holidays, such as the Tomb Sweeping Day,
the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Day. On January 30th, 1967, the government
even announced not to celebrate the Chinese New Year any longer. However, people
continued celebrating the Chinese New Year as well as other holidays underground (see Gao
2006, 2007). Given that, celebrations for old holidays did not completely disappear in China
even during the most totalitarianism period. If the Communist Party continued this policy of
eradication, they might encounter the same kind of failure that the precedent ruling party had
experienced.
However, the strategy changed shortly later. Celebrations for traditional holidays were no
longer forced to be abandoned. Instead, the government exerted a new approach to celebrate
old holidays by incorporating its socialist narratives and symbols into the old holidays. For
example, the Mid-Autumn day is a traditional festival for family reunion. By using a similar
frame, the government modified the original practice to encourage every working unit to
celebrate this unofficial festival with their socialist fellows. Accordingly, many other public
parties and traditional activities have been organized in a new form, based on the socialist
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ideology.
Charles Stafford, in his field work in rural China, observed that the government
effectively prevented the old pattern of family reunion by combining the Mid-Autumn day
with the Teachers’ Day and encouraged socialist collective activities:
The day started with an early-morning assembly, in which a series of speeches praising
education and current Communist Party leaders was made, between which prizes were
distributed to teachers and to senior academics. … This ceremonial was followed, to my
amazement, by the showing of a dubbed version of “The Professional”, starring
Jean-Claude Belmondo. Then came an enormous luncheon banquet in the college’s
dining hall. … The meal was followed in the afternoon by parties, held in each
department of the college, which centred on very long variety “programs” (2000: 52-53).
In addition, old holidays were empowered to express themselves with a modern genre.
For instance, a nationwide commemoration for the Premier Zhou Enlai on April 5th, 1976,
showed the vitality of Chinese traditional holidays. April 5th is the traditional Tomb Sweeping
Day, when Chinese people go to sweep tombs and memorize their ancestors. On that day of
1976, millions of citizens assembled in the Tiananmen Square to commemorate the beloved
Premier Zhou. The more important reason that gathered people was their hatreds against the
so called “Gang of Four,” four top officials of the central government, who were hated for
their ambitiousness to grasp the central power and their threat to the state’s stability. That day
was eventually characterized as the turning point of the Cultural Revolution (see Fairbank
and Goldman, 1998: 404).
It seemed ironical that one traditional holiday played a central role in turning the Cultural
Revolution into the end, while this revolution was initially carried out to eradicate traditional
customs. What was more appealingly witnessed was the successful integration of the
traditional sense of temporality and the socialist styles of activities. That is: marches, public
assembling, slogans, and all the other patterns that people used in this occasion were actually
shaped and used in a socialist frame. In fact, the Tomb Sweeping Day was an annual festival
when people commemorated their ancestors within a limited family clan. Commemorative
activities in this event, however, were far beyond the kinship circle. The Chinese people have
learnt to use the socialist discourse to empower their traditional past.
In sum, as Myron Cohen (1994) suggests, the Nationalist’s failure was that they failed to
incorporate the newly established national identity with the more genuine traditional markers
of identity. Cohen sees the rejection of traditional elements as the primary reason that the
Nationalists failed to gain legitimacy among general population. New rituals and holidays,
from the Durkheimian perspective, must fail if they do not correspond to the general
collectivity of the community. The Communist Party used the socialist paradigm to evoke
most Chinese people’s identity vis-à-vis the world. People’s sense of the nationhood was
paralleled with this ideological discourse. Therefore, the identity of the “socialist Chinese”
was simultaneously promoted and promoting people’s practice of the new time system in
holidays, commemorations as well as other temporal circles.
3: Cultural Chinese: The Revival of Traditions (1979-present)
After the Cultural Revolution which ended in 1976, especially after the year of 1979, the
socialist ideology became questioned by the Chinese people, as the economic reform took
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place and the western cultural elements were prevalent among younger generations. Since the
socialist ideology failed to continue shaping the Chinese people’s collective national
consciousness, the state searched for a new discourse to replace the old one. History and
tradition are rediscovered accordingly. The old calendar and its traditional holidays, as a
result, are in need because they, in this very period, serve as a tie between Chinese people and
their sense of nationhood. The value of them became revived. The cultural meaning of these
holidays is once again honored. The previous “Four Olds” have been entitled as “cultural
heritage.” Culture, rather than the precedent modernity and ideology, has been associated
with the narrative of nation to a large extent.
The frequency of the word “tradition” now far more exceeds the frequency in Mao’s era.
According to the official web page of the Central People’s Government of the People’s
Republic of China, holidays in the old time system are highly valued and named “traditions”:
Chinese traditional holidays have various styles and rich contents. They are one part of
Chinese long course of history and culture. The process of the formation of those
traditional holidays represents the accumulation of a nation’s historical culture. …6
Also, more amazingly, in the same website of the central government, the key word
“tradition” appears in 9594 web pages, whereas the key term “old holidays” only appears in 5
pages. Obviously, the word “old” has been devalued and replaced by “tradition.” This change
is quite beneficial for the resurgence of the traditional holidays. Recalling the elimination of
the “Four Olds” three decades ago, this change is incredible.
Being re-labeled from “Olds” to “traditions,” holidays in the lunar calendar are
encouraged to celebrate in the civil sphere. Nowadays, every spring, Chinese people go to
tombs to memorize their ancestors. Every summer, they eat “Zongzi” (glutinous rice
dumpling) and play “dragon boats.” Every autumn, they reunite with their family, including
parents and siblings in the Mid-Autumn day. Every winter, most Chinese people start
celebrating Chinese New Year in “Xiao Nian,” the Small New Year’s Day, seven days before
the New Year eve.
Chinese people have a strong sense of family reunion and separation (Stafford 2000).
Their nostalgic sentiments are manifested during particular days, regulated by the annual
calendar. This, according to Zerubavel, represents how the calendar socially articulates and
organizes people’s temporal regularities. But the Chinese case is more characteristic in that
Chinese people’s sentimental notion of reunion, which used to be structured by the old
temporal frame, has been also organized by the Gregorian calendar. During every seven-day’s
recession on The Labor’s Day and The National Day, which are based on the Gregorian
calendar, families are united across the country. Nostalgic feelings are inevitable when people
miss the family reunion. It is obvious that the tradition of family reunion in folk Chinese
culture have diffused into and been practiced on the newly developed holidays. Therefore, the
state has accomplished to integrate the two calendrical systems in a culturally consistent
mode.
One interesting example occurred two years ago. In 2008, the Chinese government has
for the first time designated three folk holidays as official holidays since 1911. These
holidays include the Tomb Sweeping Day, the Dragon Boats Festival, and the Mid-Autumn
Festival. As a result, the previous seven-day recess of the Labor’s Day has been shortened to
a four-day one, instead. Ironically, there have been discontent voices about this calendar
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modification. Many people feel that it sets an obstacle for their family reunion. In this sense,
the precedent boundary between traditional holidays and socialist holidays is blurring as
people’s the traditional, cultural and ideological notions of the calendars have been integrated
and schematized. This irony ostensibly represents the state’s difficulty to manage common
people’s temporalities. However, it actually reflects a great success of a new calendar system
that the Communist regime has established.
Conclusion
This paper examines how the coexistence of two calendars has emerged and maintained
in contemporary China. I argue that the ostensibly contrasting temporal systems have been
actually integrated into a schematic ideological, cultural and social system. Despite the failure
of the Nationalist Party that attempted to establish the Gregorian calendar, the Communist
Party has accomplished this mission by introducing a cosmopolitan national identity,
followed by the structural and cultural integration of the two calendars in contemporary
China. The semiotic system of time, therefore, has been consistently regulated by and
mutually dependent on the ongoing process of the development of national identity.
Table 1:
1911-1949
1949-1979
1979-present
National Identity
Modern and Chinese
Socialist Chinese
Cultural Chinese
The Gregorian Calendar
Western
Cosmopolitan
Just a calendar
People’s attitudes
Rejection
Acceptance
Integration
As Table 1 illustrates, the Nationalist Party’s imposition of the Gregorian calendar was
contested by the people because it was incompatible with people’s rooted perception and
practice of their temporal regularity. But the more fundamental reason was that the national
identity that entailed both features of modernity and Chinese was inherently paradoxical at
the first place. The Chinese people found it very difficult achieve an integral consciousness of
being Chinese while simultaneously eradicating the Chinese traditions. The socialist regime
succeeded in incorporating the Gregorian calendar into the Chinese practices by employing a
cosmopolitan narrative. Joseph Levenson (1971) reveals that the reason for which the
Communist Party integrated the nation with both discourses of modernism and nationalism
resided in the “mission” assigned in terms of the world revolutionary enterprise. This
revolutionary discourse gave the Chinese people a “leading role” for the worldwide
Communist revolutions, thereby resolving the previous perceptual paradox. The disjunction
between being a Chinese and being modern has dissolved.
Also, the three waves of the calendrical reform are not only contextually shaped. Rather,
they are internally and mutually path-dependent. Olick argues that collective memories in
different generations, albeit distinctive, have implicit coherence. Later genres of narratives
are dependent on earlier ones. “[I]mages of the past depend not only on the relationship
between past and present but also on the accumulation of previous such relationships and
their ongoing constitution and reconstitution” (1999b: 382). The Chinese reform of
calendar is to a large extent framed in this thesis. The Nationalist government, in spite of its
failure, had succeeded in introducing modern patterns of political march, commemorative
activities, national holidays and political speeches and propagandas to the Chinese people.
Inheriting these earlier establishments, the socialist regime could develop the socialist
identity effectively, thereby imposing the new temporal system into Chinese daily life. And
when the third wave took place, it used the established new temporal regularity and
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vocabulary to re-incorporate traditional calendar and holidays into China. Old holidays have
been given new values and meanings which are attached not only to present interests, but also
to modern vocabulary and genres. The revival of traditions in China, therefore, resulted from
the reconnection to the past, and the connection with the two previous reforms.
Furthermore, although each particular calendarical reform is unique to each other, the
Chinese example shows some illustrative implications for future studies. It demonstrates the
cultural significance of cognitive frameworks for institutional reforms. If a calendar plays a
critical role in our “mnemonic socialization” (Zerubavel 2003: 317), this process of
socialization also establishes certain configurations for the calendar. This explains why the
Chinese communist regime imposed its radical ideology not by obliterating the preexisting
calendar but by incorporating it with the Chinese cultural elements. One regime cannot
institutionally alter the nation’s temporal system without acknowledging the importance of
the cognitive framework in which the temporal system is constituted.
In the 21th century, the Chinese people are no longer searching for the reconciliation
between modernity and Chinese. Nor do they need to fulfill the leading role for the world
revolutionary enterprise. They have, instead, established a stable temporal regularity with a
clearly defined and practiced national identity. Nowadays, religious and folk holidays from
the west become to be celebrated more enthusiastically than the socialist holidays. This
transition represents a new mode of integration of Chinese perceptions of temporality and
identity. The relationship between China and the West is now being framed in a reciprocal
dialectic rather than a rhetorical dichotomy.
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References
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6 http://www.gov.cn/test/2006-06/06/content_301399.htm
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