Spring Festival, Qingming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival are the four major traditional festivals in the mainland, of which the Spring Festival is the most lively and grand one. There are similar but different Spring Festival customs throughout the country, but their purpose is to welcome the old and welcome the new, suppress evil, pray for blessings, worship ancestors, and so on. The historical origin of the Spring Festival can no longer be verified, archaeologists believe that the Spring Festival is a festival produced by long-term development, and there are many myths and legends about the Spring Festival, such as the New Year Beast, the Vesta God and so on.
I believe that many people are most looking forward to the Spring Festival when they are young, because they can eat a lot of candy and delicious food during the Spring Festival, do not need to go to school, can lie in the bed and sleep until they wake up naturally, and can also receive a lot of big red envelopes. Although many elderly people think that the "taste of the year" is getting weaker and weaker, the Spring Festival is still the most grand festival of the year. But what you surely don't know is that one year the mainland forbade all domestic people to celebrate the Spring Festival, did not allow any celebration ceremonies, and there were people patrolling the streets during the New Year, even if they congratulated neighbors and said blessings, they would be punished.
In 1912, the Qing Dynasty was overthrown by the Xinhai Revolution and replaced by the Republic of China. Because the feudal dynasty was history, many progressives called on the people to abandon feudal thinking, and in 1915 the New Culture Movement, led by a group of intellectuals, clearly put forward the slogan "oppose feudalism and support science". The original intention of the New Culture Movement was good, but gradually it deviated from its original purpose, and these intellectuals regarded everything left over from the feudal era as waste.
For example, Qian Xuantong (father of Qian Sanqiang, the father of China's atomic bomb) believes that Confucian Taoism is feudal witchology, and Chinese characters are accomplices of these monsters and should be abolished. Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Qu Qiubai and others all agreed with Qian Xuantong's views, and in the eyes of modern people, the views of these great literary heroes were indeed somewhat extreme. Because of this anti-old wave that rose at that time, some people also proposed to abolish the lunar calendar that has been passed down on the mainland for thousands of years and adopt the internationally accepted Gregorian calendar year.
In 1928, the Republic of China government issued a notice called "Measures for Assisting the Abolition of the Old Calendar for the Universal Use of the New Calendar", in which the Republic of China government demanded that the people of the whole country and overseas stop using the lunar calendar and adopt the Gregorian calendar from January 1, 1929, and all traditional festivals in the lunar calendar were suspended, including the Spring Festival. Later, the Republic of China government also issued a supplementary note to continue working during the Lunar New Year, prohibiting people from sticking couplets or holding rallies, and prohibiting a series of traditional Spring Festival activities such as firecrackers and dragon and lion dances.
But celebrating the Spring Festival has been adhered to as a custom for thousands of years, and it can be said that it has been carved into the marrow of the Chinese nation. So few people actually complied with the notice, and people celebrated the New Year as usual. The year after the decree was issued, the Republic of China government specially invited Cai Yuanpei, the former president of Peking University, to give a speech, but it also had little effect, and even the people in Nanjing, Shanghai and other places were just as happy as in previous years.
In the fifth year of this tug-of-war between the abolition of traditional festivals and not, the Republic of China government, seeing that the people were still going their own way, decided to implement the Gregorian calendar by forceful means, and in the first month of 1934, it ordered the troops in various places to patrol the streets and specifically arrest those celebrating the Spring Festival, so many people were locked up in jail, and some even just habitually said "Happy New Year". Such rogue orders naturally provoked popular discontent, and many literati wrote letters condemning such violence.
In 1934, the Republic of China government abolished the ban on the grounds that "customs follow each other and it is difficult to return", which is also the only time in mainland history that the Spring Festival has been banned.