China politicising Qingming, other traditional festivals to reinforce CCP legitimacy: Report
Naypyidaw, June 13 (IANS) The politicisation of Qingming and other traditional festivals reflects a wider effort to embed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authority within China’s cultural and emotional fabric, making political loyalty appear as natural and cyclical as the seasons.
Historically, Qingming was a family-centred spring ritual combining tomb-sweeping, ancestor veneration, and outdoor excursions. Imperial and early modern records describe it as a time for “honouring the dead and remembering the distant past”, focused primarily on lineage and family ties rather than state ceremony, a report has stated.
“Across contemporary China, the Qingming festival is no longer only a quiet day for family grave‑sweeping; it has become a platform on which the Chinese Communist Party tells a story of revolutionary sacrifice, patriotic virtue and regime legitimacy. This fusion of private bereavement with public ideology now extends across the traditional festival calendar, from Spring Festival to Mid‑Autumn, as the Party-State apparatus seeks to embed its authority in the emotional rhythms of everyday life,” a report in Myanmar media outlet ‘Mizzima News’ detailed.
The report stressed that Qingming forms part of a broader project to nationalise and politicise traditional festivals.
“Official commentaries present the Dragon Boat Festival as a commemoration of the loyal, self‑sacrificing poet‑official Qu Yuan, whose story is used to sensationalise ideals of virtuousness and patriotic commitment, including in anti‑corruption and patriotic‑education campaigns. Mid‑Autumn is reinterpreted as a festival of ‘family‑nation feeling’, where the emotional pull of reunion is overtly connected to identification with the state and the ‘Chinese’,” it mentioned.
According to the report, the expanding body of academic and policy literature on “traditional festivals as carriers of ideological and political education” makes this logic evident.
It cited scholars and party school writers who argue that the rich symbolism and emotional resonance of festivals make them ideal vehicles for promoting core socialist values, particularly among youth, while calling on the universities and schools to “systematise” festival based patriotic and moral education.
In this vision, the report noted that the calendar itself functions as a governance technology, with each festival serving as a recurring touchpoint through which the CCP “re-arms” citizens emotionally and symbolically.
“For many families, Qingming is still first and foremost a day to clean graves, burn incense or offer flowers, and remember parents and grandparents—often at some distance from official rhetoric. Yet the Party’s sustained effort to overlay this intimate rite with revolutionary martyrs, patriotic slogans and disciplinary rules means that even the most private acts of commemoration now take place within a thick web of state narratives and expectations,” it stated.
–IANS
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