Stolen Seasons: How China Turned a Shared Festival Into Its Own Lunar New Year has never belonged to a single nation. Vietnamese families ce...

Stolen Seasons: How China Turned a Shared Festival Into Its Own

Lunar New Year has never belonged to a single nation. Vietnamese families celebrate Tết, Koreans observe Seollal, and communities across Southeast Asia welcome the new lunar cycle with rituals shaped by their own histories. What they share is a regional inheritance, not a debt to China, even though China has often framed the season as exclusively Chinese.

The origin story looks less like a single “Chinese tradition” and more like a shared regional pattern built around the farming year. Early Han society formed in the Yellow River basin with dry field staples like millet and wheat, while many rituals now treated as Lunar New Year essentials align more naturally with wet rice cultures south of the Yangtze. In that southern world, seasonal transition, harvest gratitude, earth spirit worship, and ancestral feasting were already part of community life long before Han expansion absorbed those regions. Over time, what had multiple roots was repackaged as a single label, and the label became the story.

That matters because naming is power, and power often works through erasure. Once the holiday is constantly labeled “Chinese New Year,” Vietnam and Korea are quietly repositioned as cultures that merely received their most intimate rituals from China. This is not just semantic. A culture described as derivative is easier to politically pressure, because people are nudged to feel historical indebtedness toward the nation that claims ownership of their shared traditions. Erasure does not always look like censorship. Sometimes it looks like a “normal” name that leaves everyone else unnamed.

In the modern era, the most effective vehicle for this narrative is often not diplomacy. It is entertainment. Celebrities with massive youth followings post “Chinese New Year” greetings that flatten Tết into a Chinese label, with no recognition of Vietnam’s own name, rituals, or cultural framing. Repeated across platforms by admired public figures, the phrase becomes a default. It stops sounding like a claim and starts sounding like reality.

[I] Psychology has a name for this. The illusory truth effect describes how repetition increases perceived truth, even when the statement is inaccurate. Over time, the language itself does the work. What began as a casual caption becomes a cultural reclassification. The more often a generation sees the label, the more normal it feels, until correcting it starts to look like “overreacting,” and accepting it starts to look like “being reasonable.” That is Erasure in its most efficient form: not an argument you lose, but a premise you stop questioning. [II] 

 [III] When young Vietnamese fans defend idols who erase Tết under the banner of “Chinese New Year,” they are not only defending a celebrity. They are rehearsing a worldview in which their own culture is secondary, and where the right to name their most important festival no longer belongs to them. The most complete form of assimilation is not forced compliance. [IV] It is voluntary adoption. A generation that internalizes “Chinese New Year” as the default label is a generation that has accepted, in everyday language, what centuries of domination struggled to achieve.

Extra notes

Geography and agriculture tell a sharper version of the same story. Early Han society grew from the Yellow River basin, where dry-field farming dominated and staples like millet and wheat matched the climate. That setting does not naturally produce many of the wet-rice seasonal ideas tied to Lunar New Year practices in the south, such as rice-cycle symbolism, harvest offerings, earth spirit worship, and communal ancestral feasting.

Those rhythms fit far more closely with the world south of the Yangtze, where wet-rice agriculture shaped both livelihood and ritual long before Han expansion fully absorbed the region. Vietnamese traditions like the bánh chưng legend, associated with the Hùng Kings and steeped in wet-rice symbolism, read less like a borrowed northern custom and more like continuity from older southern agricultural civilizations.

Even classical texts complicate the usual Sinocentric narrative. Confucius, in records associated with ritual practice, describes southern farming peoples holding seasonal festivals around the lunar cycle to mark agricultural transition. The tone is observational, not proprietary. He is noticing a practice, not claiming it as the default “Chinese” norm. That detail matters, because it aligns with a broader historical pattern: as Han power expanded southward through centuries of conquest, settlement, and administrative absorption, local customs were increasingly folded into imperial culture, renamed, standardized, and then retroactively presented as native inheritance. 

[Adapted from Book of Rites and Cơ Sở Văn Hóa Việt Nam]

Question 31: Where in the passage does the following sentence best fit?

That is why the backlash, and the defense against backlash, is so revealing.

A. [I]         B. [II]         C. [III]         D. [IV]

Question 32: The word "they" in paragraph 1 refers to __________.

A. regional groups                B. Southeast Asian communities

C. Lunar New Year rituals                D. Korean and Chinese nations

Question 33: The phrase “repackaged as a single label” in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to __________.

A. recorded as a local custom        B. reframed under one name

C. preserved with full detail                    D. divided into many versions

Question 34: According to paragraph 2, which of the following is NOT a characteristic of the original Lunar New Year rituals?

A. They were deeply rooted in the agricultural cycles of wet rice cultures.

B. They included activities like earth spirit worship and ancestral feasting.

C. They originated primarily from the dry field staples of the Yellow River basin.

D. They existed as part of community life before the expansion of Han society.

Question 35: Which of the following best summarises the content of the third paragraph?

A. Power works through naming and censorship to ensure that intimate rituals are received by Vietnam and Korea as a form of historical indebtedness.

B. The persistent use of a specific label for the holiday functions as a tool of cultural erasure, making independent cultures appear secondary and derivative.

C. Political pressure is the only way for a nation to claim ownership of shared traditions and leave other cultures unnamed in their intimate rituals.

D. Semantic changes in cultural names are irrelevant to political power because erasure always looks like a normal name that everyone accepts as a reality.

Question 36: The word "derivative" in paragraph 3 is OPPOSITE in meaning to __________.

A. borrowed        B. original        C. familiar        D. similar

Question 37: Based on the passage, what is the role of the "illusory truth effect" in the naming of the festival?

A. It provides a psychological argument for celebrities to use accurate captions when greeting their fans during the holiday.

B. It helps generations recognize that correcting a cultural label is a reasonable reaction to centuries of political domination.

C. It makes a misleading label seem like an objective reality through constant repetition, eventually discouraging people from questioning it.

D. It ensures that the right to name important festivals belongs to the youth who follow celebrities with massive online followings.

Question 38: Which of the following best paraphrases the underlined sentence in paragraph 4?

A. By using the term "Chinese New Year," famous people help the youth recognize that Tết and Chinese rituals share the same cultural framing and names.

B. Influential figures contribute to the loss of cultural identity by categorizing Tết under a foreign name, thereby ignoring its unique Vietnamese characteristics.

C. Famous individuals are effectively promoting Vietnamese rituals to the youth by using a label that flattens all regional names into one recognizable greeting.

D. The youth follow celebrities who flatten the Chinese label into Tết, which encourages a wider recognition of Vietnam's own rituals and cultural names.

Question 39: Which of the following can most likely be inferred from the passage?

A. The Han expansion was successful because it provided a superior agricultural pattern compared to the wet rice cultures south of the Yangtze.

B. Young Vietnamese fans who defend their idols' use of "Chinese New Year" are consciously trying to achieve what centuries of domination could not.

C. Cultural ownership is often established through the control of everyday language and media rather than through official laws or physical force.

D. If a statement is repeated often enough, it will eventually become a historical fact regardless of whether it aligns with ancient agricultural records.

Question 40: Which of the following best summarises the passage?

A. The Lunar New Year is a shared regional inheritance that has been accurately preserved through the illusory truth effect by celebrities in the modern entertainment era.

B. Vietnamese and Korean cultures should accept "Chinese New Year" as a default label to be reasonable and avoid overreacting to the historical roots of Han society.

C. The naming of the Lunar New Year as "Chinese" acts as a tool of cultural erasure that ignores shared regional roots and nudges younger generations toward voluntary assimilation.

D. Diplomacy and entertainment have successfully proven that the Yellow River basin is the single origin of all rituals practiced by wet rice cultures south of the Yangtze.