A Debate About the Festivals in China and Western Countries.doc

A Debate About the Festivals in China and Western CountriesPeople around the world like celebrating festivals, especially young people. Ask the ss name the festivals they know, such as the Spring Festivals, the Lantern Festival, the Dragon-boat Festival, Christmas, Halloween, Valentines Day, Thanksgiving Day, etc. Then give the ss the topic of the debate: Chinese festivals or western festivals?Then divide the students into two groups. Group One are for Chinese traditional festivals. Group Two are for western festivals.Choose 4 students as the debaters for each groupStep one: Each group have their own discussion and make preparation for the debate.Step two: The debaters present the points of view off their groups. Then the debate begin.After the debate,the teacher give the closing speech. Every culture has its own history and developing background. One culture can never replace another. In recent years,with the development of the society ,we let in some western culture. At the same time, some foreigners begin celebrating Spring Festivals.Defending the Chinese New Year? A Cultural Debate A so-called "defending the Spring Festival movement" has gained nation-wide attention and Xinhua New Agency has related it to more tradition-styled celebrations of this year's Chinese New Year across the country, such as miao hui (temple fair, mostly held in parks, featuring traditional food, artifacts and art performances), firecrackers and traditional decorations.The state-run news agency reported last week that “defending the Spring Festival has become a common view of the Chinese society,” thanks to Mr. Gao Youpeng, a folk culture scholar from Henan province, who first initiated the idea in 2005. Mr. Gao apparently was pleased by the restoration of more traditional Chinese New Year rituals, which he said “demonstrates that Chinese people are returning to traditions,” Xinhua reported. Mr. Gao wrote a “Declaration of Defending the Spring Festival” at the end of 2005, warning about the infiltration of Western culture and stressing that “defending the Spring Festival is defending safety of the national culture."He said he made such a call because he found that many young people who lived in the world of the Internet and video games worshiped Western culture, passionate in celebrating foreign holidays like Christmas but becoming increasingly indifferent toward their own traditional holidays, Xinhua reported. He said he felt “the safety of Chinas national culture is to some degree under threat.”In fact, the Chinese public has noted for a long time that the Chinese New Year, mostly called the Spring Festival in China, is losing its traditional flavor, while young people seem to enjoy more in celebrating Christmas or Valentines Day, when they can have more fun on their own. The discussion, however, had rarely been put in the spot light of state news agency like Xinhua, and the Internet has facilitated a public debate on the issue to a larger scale.The mast majority of the opinions on the Internet and other media, not surprisingly, supported Mr. Gaos view. People expressed a strong sense of the importance of maintaining Chinas cultural tradition, as well as concerns that it is diminishing in the wake of Western culture influx. One comment, for example, reads: “Without traditional culture, it is meaningless no matter how powerful China becomes.” Another one says that Western holidays “are flooding into Chinese society and peoples life,” and under the challenge, traditional holidays like the Spring Festival “are fading away gradually.”There are of course different views, but are mainly focused on whether it is necessary to call for defending the traditional holiday, or whether the best way to make it attractive is to simply fall back on old rituals, with the theme of maintaining Chinas cultural tradition almost unchallenged.A critic from Beijing questioned in a newspaper article: “does Spring Festival need everybody to save or defend?” To him, nobody in China is forgetting the holiday and therefore no worry is merited. Another critic dismissed the worry by citing the increasing awareness of the Chinese New Year in the entire world.While a group of people called for bringing back the traditional way of celebrating the holiday, others insisted that the holiday needed contemporary contents and labeled the defending theory “cultural conservatism.”“Todays Spring Festival of course needs to represent the modern life style,” one blogger writes, “dont think that without traditional theater and miao hui, the Spring Festival will no longer exist.” Nevertheless, advocators of modernization of the traditional holiday mostly fell short of providing specific proposals to reach the goal.After all, people are facing one question: how to celebrate the Chinese New Year in a way that could both maintain an ancient tradition and make it fit the new time and attractive to the new generation. The answer is yet to come.The reality is more of a mixed picture. While traditional festivities like setting off firecrackers, family gathering and visiting miao hui are still dominantly popular, new activities like tourism, text message greetings and partying with friends are also gaining grounds. Meanwhile, other old traditions, such as worshiping ancestors and kneeling down in front of seniors, have almost completely disappeared. the status of women in the society changes. For example, traditional Chinese people think men and women are not equal which is influenced by Confusion. Womens job is just taking care of babies or doing the housework. However, the Western culture tells us we should give men and women the equal right. More and more talented women use their own ability to improve themthey can do what man can do. So we should thank those people who fight for the womens right in the early western countiesSecondly, lots of new science and technologies are introduced into our country, which indirectly improve our living condition and the quality of the society in recent years. We can see the lifestyle becomes different. It means our life become more colorful. At this aspect, it should be extremely necessary to put it into the spotlight, for it is the major achievement the western culture made.  We no longer only wear Zhongshan fu, in stead; we have more new modern clothes, different color, different styles. We begin to know how the westerners celebrate their own festivals. So these are all very new and fresh for us, which we are more likely to imitate. The Valentines Day enrich the life of lovers, and it is really so romantic. The Christmas let you experience the different custom. People become open, they want to take those new and interesting and exciting things which they havent tried before.Thirdly, language, like cultures, is influenced by the western culture. The necessities of intercourse bring the speakers of one language into direct or indirect contact with those of neighboring or culturally dominant languages. We borrowed a lot of new words from western countries, such as sofa(沙发), Coca-Cola （可乐）, coffee（咖啡）,www(万微网)，GDP(国内生产总值), cool(酷). All of these words make our life more convenient and interestingFourthly, some good elements of Western culture do affect Chinese society. For example, in modern western society, the lives of most old and disabled people are secured by perfect social insurance system so the prevalence of individualism has few problems here. We learned from them to establish the social insurance system, and accomplished it step by step, so more and more disadvantaged peoples life are insured in Chinese society.Finally, as we have proved, Chinese traditional culture is enriched by Western culture. What we should do now is how to benefit from the influence, at the same time we can make our Chinese culture brighter. One famous figure in Western culture, Jesus, asked “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Our answer is we will gain the whole world without losing its own culture.