(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-09-25 19:27

Zhao Lihong, writer and a member of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), has made four proposals suggesting the Mid-Autumn Festival is made a public holiday.

"Celebrating the festival can remind people of their families and siblings when they are engaged in pursuing their career," he said, adding that as more and more young people choose to work out of their hometowns, many elderly are left at home alone.

"Rejuvenating this traditional festival is also a way of promoting traditional ethnics that underline family harmony and filial piety," he said.

Experts attending a forum in Xiamen recently have called for the week-long May Day holiday and the National Day holiday to be shortened to make up for the lost traditional holidays, including the Mid-Autumn Day, the Lantern Festival, the Tomb-Sweeping Day, the Dragon-Boat Festival and Double Nine Day.

"If we can celebrate an international festival like the May Day holiday with seven days, why begrudge us a day off for our own ones?" said Hu Shensheng, a sociology professor at Shanghai University.

But Chen Tongming, vice director of the Academy of Social Sciences in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, has said that the move is not enough to preserve the traditional festival, especially when some young people have shifted their attention to foreign holidays.

"Preserving traditional festivals needs people's deeper understanding in their own culture as well as the change of social atmosphere, which is a long process," he said.

His opinion was echoed by Xu Ting, a 27-year-old employee with a foreign company in Beijing who celebrated Christmas and Valentine's Day.

"I know Mid-Autumn Festival is an important traditional holiday second only to the Spring Festival," she said, "but I can't feel it and nobody reminded me."

"If lanterns were hung in department stores a month before the festival just like Christmas bells and the portrait of Chang'e painted on windows like Santa Claus, I would definitely celebrate it."

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