CNY - more to it than you might think

Each year, the Chinese New Year (CNY) holiday seems to attract more and more attention from people around the world.

We often think about it in terms of how we westerners celebrate the Western New Year, with parties and singing and fireworks. In fact, CNY has more of a Christmas or Thanksgiving meaning to most Chinese people. Not in the religious sense, but in the family sense.

A famous Dutch psychologist named Geert Hoffstede published a now well-known thesis on understanding cultural differences. In it he described phenomena such as the Power-Distance ratio. We often hear of this in things such as the TV show Air Crash Investigation - the co-pilot didn’t stop the captain’s mistake because the captain is boss.

But Hoffstede had another dimension in his thesis which applies particularly in China. That was Individualism vs Collectivism. When we westerners look at how China works, we often do so through the paradigm of our own personal freedoms and the individual values that our society runs by. We think of things in terms of individual rights, gaining personal wealth, individual pursuits and so on.

But for many Chinese people, this is not how they view the world. For many Asian societies, the family or the collective come first, not the individual. In many ways, it ties back to the teachings of Confucius. Family and community ties tend to be stronger in these societies. Hence why we see 600 million people travel back to their home towns for the CNY holiday.

It’s those ties back to family that help to reinforce some of the CNY traditions. The red envelope, or Hong Bao, is handed out, brimming with money. Dumplings are eaten on day 1 of the new year, and many people will visit a shrine on day 3 to honour their ancestors. CNY is certainly a time for relaxing, but much of the time is about family, because family is at the core of most Chinese folk.