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RECONSRUCTING TIME: CALENDRICAL REFORM IN CHINA 1911- PRESENT

HAIMING YAN UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Abstract

This paper examines three waves of calendrical reform in modern China since 1911. I argue that the imposition of the Gregorian calendar represents a dynamical relationship between Chinese national identity and temporality. It reveals that an institutional transformation of the calendrical system is to a great extent culturally and cognitively determined. During the Republican era, the Gregorian calendar involved two contrasting implications: being Chinese and being western, which encountered resistances from the society. The Nationalist Party failed to integrate these two discourses into a schematic narrative system because the party’s own definition of the nation was inherently paradoxical and inconsistent. However, the Gregorian calendar was more compatible during the socialist era in that the Communist Party transcended this dichotomy between “Chinese” and “western” by establishing a universalistic and cosmopolitan narrative of the nation. This narrative conceptualized the calendar as part of the revolutionary process.

Also, since late 20th century, there has been a revival of Chinese traditional holidays. Public consciousness of Chinese traditional calendar has risen in accordance with the increasing passion about the nation’s past. This transition represents a new mode of integration of Chinese perceptions of time and identity, as well as a dissolving boundary between the Gregorian calendar and the Chinese calendar.

Calendars in China

The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar one, systematically consisting of both elements from a lunar calendar and a solar calendar. One month of the Chinese calendar is based on one cycle of the moon, while it uses leap months to correct for its deviation from the astronomical year. This Chinese lunisolar calendar could be dated back to 500 BCE, and had been officially employed until the Republican Revolution in 1911.

However, although the state and state-run organizations have been employing the Gregorian calendar since 1911, contemporary China is still temporally organized by two different systems of calendar: the Gregorian calendar, and the Chinese calendar. Most traditional holidays are being practiced and celebrated based on the old calendar. This coexistence of temporal systems has engendered difficulties in particular circumstances. For example, the winter break for each school year is determined by the date of the Chinese New Year, which varies between Jan 21 and Feb 19. If the Chinese new year arrives early in a year, the winter break should be scheduled early, which in turn shortens the length of the fall semester. 98

In spite of some conflicts, these seemingly unpractical temporal systems have been practiced in contemporary China in a smoothly effective way. As indicated in this paper, this coexistence may be a combined consequence of the Nationalist Party’s failure to eradicate the old calendar and the Communist Party’s success of integrating the two systems. Why did the Nationalist Party fail? Why did the Communist Party succeed? In this paper, I will review three waves of the calendrical reform in modern China. Established with Zerubavel’s argument that calendar and commemorative holidays attached with the calendar promote the formation of national identity (1981; 2004), this paper extends his thesis by adding that the way people adopt, perceive and practice the calendar is mutually shaped by the nature of their national identity.

I find that the Gregorian calendar has been characterized by the Chinese people in three categories alongside the reform processes: western, cosmopolitan, and Chinese. First, people during the Republican era rejected the Gregorian calendar in that it entailed a western feature that contrasted with their Chinese consciousness. Then the Communists succeeded in establishing a schematic discourse that interpreted the Gregorian calendar as a cosmopolitan one, which was consistent with the authoritarian political atmosphere. Nowadays, the third wave of the calendrical reform reflects a dissolving boundary between the Gregorian calendar and the Chinese calendar, both of which have been understood by the Chinese people as integral parts of their temporal system.

Calendar and Identity

Calendar is one important message conveying how a community conceptualizes “the dimension of time, and hence, of ‘making sense’ of an important facet of human lived experience” (Stern 2001: v). As Durkheim writes, “a calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity” (1965: 23). Besides the function of social solidarity, a calendar also expresses how a community attaches meanings to its temporal circle (Zerubavel 1981: 82). Additionally, a calendar also functions as an embodiment of an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). Mnemonic practices have an inevitable affinity with this calendrical coincidence. Calendar also functions in shaping the social organization of memory (Connerton 1989).

Social groups use the calendrical means to highlight their distinctiveness vis-à-vis other groups. This establishment of intergroup boundaries, in consequence, facilitates basic patterns of group members’ perceptions and narratives of their past as well as their commemorative activities. A distinctive temporal regularity, according to Zerubavel, is one of the most important underlying themes distinguishing one group from another. The calendar is the “first major institution that man invented in order to establish and maintain temporal regularity” (1982: 31). Furthermore, holidays embodies a certain calendar. They highlight the significant sites of the “temporal map” and reproduce what Nora (1989) calls social “sites” of memory (lieux de memoire). “The holiday cycle itself constitutes a traditional site of memory, anchored in a centuries-old tradition” (Y Zerubavel, 1995: 216). And they ensure the “mnemonic synchronization” (Zerubavel 1996) for mnemonic communities. In sum, holidays provide commemorative settings reflecting and reconstructing the past.

Hence, a calendrical reform is an approach employed by a regime to develop and maintain its legitimacy, especially when a new regime is attempting to draw a break from its past regimes and from other groups. Mohammed’s calendrical reform to replace the Arab lunisolar calendar with a new lunar calendar, for example, was an obvious case to segregate 99 the Moslems from non-Moslems. By the same token, the calendrical dissociation of Easter from Passover was an early attempt to promote the social segregation of Christians from Jews (Zerubavel 1982).

By the same token, failures of calendrical reforms may generate more implications to our understanding the dialects of calendar. One example was the French Republican calendrical reform of 1793. As Zerubavel (1981) concludes, the reform failed since it disorganized the society’s anchored temporal regularity based on temporally religious circles.

The Soviet reform of calendar and its failure was more revealing. In 1929, a radical reform of the calendar was undertaken in Soviet Russia. “The Communist authorities abolished both the Julian calendar, used by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the official Gregorian calendar that had been installed by Lenin” (Achelis 1954). Instead, a new calendar was introduced. All religious festivals and holy days were replaced by five national public holidays associated with the revolutionary events. This calendar was named the “Eternal Calendar.”

The major objective of this new calendar was to increase industrial production. Nevertheless, it was too unrealistic to exert because such a reform would cause real hardship to family life. After several years of trial, in 1931, this calendar was replaced by another system which introduced a new week of six days wherein the rest-day came regularly on the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th and 30th of the month. However, from 1940 the Gregorian calendar with its seven-day week was reestablished by the central government, which returned to the idea of Lenin. Russia was once more using the same calendar as “all the civilized countries of the world” (Achelis 1954, also in Zerubavel 1981: 27-44).

As Zerubavel (1981) suggests, these reforms failed to gain social supports because it entirely obliterated the old temporal order, entirely secularized the society, and entirely ignored the cognitive condition on a global context. Analogous with Zerubavel’s findings, the case of the Chinese calendrical reform, both its failure and success, reveals a somewhat interesting fact. A calendrical reform may at first fail but eventually succeed, depending on both contextual changes and textual path-dependence.

China’s Calendrical Reform: from Rejection to Integration

The calendrical reform in China reflects two main similarities with its French and Russian counterparts. First, they are all based on the ideology that entails the discourse of teleological, progressive development, thereby marking a boundary between a new state and the past. Second, all of these three reforms encountered a wide and strong resistance from the society. Whereas the French and Soviet reforms eventually ceased, the Gregorian calendar has been finally integrated into the Chinese temporal frame. In the following part, three waves of the calendrical reform since 1911 are examined: 1) the Nationalist era from 1911 to 1949, 2) the Communist era from 1949 to 1979, and 3) the Reform era since 1979. These three waves are associated with three different types of national identity that the regimes attempted to establish: 1) the modern Chinese, 2) the Socialist Chinese, and 3) the cultural Chinese. The establishment of a new calendar, by and large, is highly associated with the characteristics of national identity. 100

1: Nationalist: New and Chinese (1911-1949)

In 1911, the Republican Revolution took place in China and took over the Manchu regime. The new nation, the Republic of China, was primarily established by western- educated elites, intellectuals and their military allies. Although the centralist paradigm of this revolution was to establish a pure Chinese nation, its basic ideological discourse and administrative system were mainly developed and maintained by western models. The new government was entitled the National Government, explicitly implying the nature of the government as the representative for the Chinese people. Similar to the French and Soviet revolutions, the new authorities employed a series of policies to eliminate every essential aspect of the old regime, including the old Chinese calendar that had used for thousands of years. The Gregorian calendar was introduced and legitimized as the only official calendar. The temporary president of the Republic Sun Yat-sen demanded the implement of the Gregorian calendar at his inauguration.i Accordingly, traditional holidays regulated by the Chinese calendar were marginalized as “unofficial” and characterized as “feudal remains.”

On September 24th, 1912, lawmakers passed the proposal for the National Day on October 10th. The congress also designated some other memorial days as national holidays. By 1929, there had been 28 public holidays, most of which were derived from revolutionary events. On the National Day in each year, celebrations were held nationally and students were organized to participate in marches. The concepts of march, public commemoration and political speech became common to the Chinese people. Considering the nature of political, social and cultural transitions, the national government did not fully abandon celebrations for old holidays in the very beginning (Sun 1982: 53-54).

As Prasenjit Duara (1995) observes, the introduction of the Gregorian calendar constituted and represented the establishment of a linear historicity and its association with the nation-state. The Gregorian calendar served as a symbolism that represented a kind of modern sense of citizenship. The progressive rhetoric implied by the new calendar received certain degree of resonance from the public. Some people acknowledged the calendar and practiced it. A diarist Liu Dapeng, in a delightful narrative, recorded his family’s celebration for the Gregorian New Year in 1929 by eating meat dumplings (Harrison 2001: 201).

However, besides the resonances, resistances were even stronger. Most ordinary people were reluctant to accept this new temporal frame. They were still living with the old calendar and celebrating old holidays. The imposition of the solar calendar might be the most widely resented reform during that time. It was, to some extent, only effective within the administrative sphere. The resentments emerged from rural and urban areas, as well as from profit and non-profit occupations.

The new temporal frame was hardly supported by businessmen, whose basic economic activities were closely tied to the cycle of the lunar year. This was because the three main holidays in the old calendar – the Chinese New Year, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid- Autumn Festival were also the settlement dates for all debts. A debate about whether to convert to the Gregorian calendar occurred in Hangzhou’s chamber of commerce.ii Debaters eventually acknowledged the difficulty to simultaneously be a citizen to comply with the new calendar, and be a businessman to practice the Chinese lunar calendar. In fact, the implement of one calendar not only reflected people’s temporal regularity, but also constituted their status and membership in the community vis-à-vis the others. Therefore, since most people were involved in more than one group in a transforming society, a variety of communities 101 gave those multi-status people a strong dilemma in terms of their temporal cognition and pattern. In addition, rural residents, as recorded by Liu Dapeng on his visit to a local town, expressed indifferences for the new calendar. They continued practicing the old holidays (Harrison 2001: 201).

Ironically, this civic resentment was even stronger among administrative members. An author and school teacher Lao She expressed his hard time on the lunar New Year Eve: when his elderly mother was waiting for the family reunion for the whole day, he had to comply with the solar calendar and only had a couple of hours to visit his mother. As he stated, his mother was silent when he finally returned home and he, more miserly, was tearing.

The Nationalist Party did not acknowledge the social roots of these resistances. According to the government, however, these resistances resulted from people’s ignorance and backward ideas. The authorities assumed that people would adopt the new calendar once their thoughts had been framed in the progressive narrative. Therefore, on May.7, 1928, the Department of Internal Affairs proposed a project to fully abandon the old calendar:

Over the past ten years, our citizens’ daily lives are still based on the old calendar … there is a huge disparity between the policy and the social practice. It would be a humiliation of the state’s reputation and status in the world if this discrepancy continues. iii

Thus, the state designed eight prepositions to fundamentally eradicate the old calendar. Two years later, the government expanded its propaganda. It published a book named Fengsu Gaige Yekan (Reform of the Folk Culture) in 1930, which sharply criticized the old calendar and its holidays as “old and dirty habits.” New holidays were accordingly acclaimed as advanced and progressive:

Dear Revolutionary Fellow Citizens,

Since the National Government established the Gregorian calendar, we have heard that some comrades are still practicing the old calendar, continuing expecting and actively preparing for the old New Year. These acts unintentionally inhibited the development of our country. Therefore, we have to say something to correct this mistake.iv

In spite of the series of attempts, the Gregorian calendar still failed to be incorporated into the Chinese temporal consciousness. Folk holidays continued to be practiced and celebrated. Admitting this failure, in 1934, the government gave in. It acknowledged the durability of the celebrations for old holidays (Wu and Ruan, 2000), and stop the attempt to eradicate the old calendar. Since then, there has been the coexistence between the official Gregorian calendar and the old lunar calendar.v

According to Zerubavel (1981), the implement of a new calendar must be little renounced when it failed to fit people’s fundamental sense of temporal regularity. More importantly, regarding the association between calendar and national identity, the Nationalist regime was trying to integrate two contradictory discourses of national identity together: 1) to be Chinese, and 2) to be “modern”. But the authorities failed to differentiate being modern from being western, whereby the rhetorical modernity entailed in this narrative was inevitably intertwined with the representation of the West. In this context, problems occurred not because of the imposition of the new calendar, but due to the attempt to eradicate the old 102 one. It was a dilemma to establish a collective identity that entails both newness and Chinese, especially when the traditional way of family reunion was abandoned on traditional holidays.

In fact, holding a Chinese identity with a western calendrical system reflected another dilemma. Liu Dapeng, for instance, depicted the new state as a “foreign system of government, the solar calendar and foreign costume” (1990: 175). Using foreign symbols and manners to facilitate a national identity rejected the culturally elaborated sense of nationhood and unmistakably separated the new elite from the masses. The calendrical reform had not only challenged people’s fundamental temporal regularity, but also disconnected their affinity with their Chinese characteristics. Simply put, the failure was rooted at the very beginning. The Nationalist Party attempted to promote a Chinese identity with a calendar perceived as a western symbol, whereas the two discourses were implicitly and exclusively inconsistent.

2: Socialist Chinese (1949-1979)

After the Communist Party took over the mainland, it discarded most policies of the Nationalist Party. However, the Gregorian calendar was retained. The socialist regime also used the calendar to establish its legitimacy and a national identity. But this identity differed from the previous “modern and Chinese.” Rather, it was characterized as the “Socialist new Chinese.” When associated with the socialist discourse, the concept of Chinese is not confined within a territorial limit. Instead, it articulated a cosmopolitan implication. The socialist Chinese was regarded as an advanced dimension of national consciousness in that it did not only define Chinese citizens’ national status, but also provided them a leading role for the world’s socialist revolutions. This identity was effectively established and maintained in the commemoration of national holidays, the seven-day’s weekly circle, as well as even traditional holidays. Rather than disconnect people’s ties from the past, the socialist regime incorporated the past into a present narrative. The implement of the Gregorian calendar was consequently successful with the establishment of the socialist identity.

The National Day

The Nationalist Party’s holidays were replaced by new ones that involved major commemorative events for the Communist movement, especially the National Day on the 1st of October since 1949. In spite of the opposite ideologies between the Communists and the Nationalists, political actors in both parties were using same strategies and patterns of concepts and narratives to diffuse new symbols for the nation. For example, the National Day was commemorated seriously by both of them. In the Nationalist era, ordinary people assembled on that day to express their affection to the nation. The Communist National Day, similarly, had been annually celebrated until early 1970s. People assembled everywhere to show their affection to the beloved Chairman Mao as well as the socialist China. The National Day, to a great extent, would be meaningless without its affiliation with the ideology of socialism.

Week

The concept of week is “an artificial rhythm that was created by human beings totally independently of any natural periodicity” (Zerubavel 1985: 4). Perhaps the most significant part of the Gregorian calendar’s implementation in China was the wide adoption of the seven- day’s week circle. Because of the totalitarianism in agricultural, industrial, educational and 103 commercial spheres, the newly established socialist country was temporally organized in this coherent and integral mechanism. Different from the nationwide resistances during the Republican period, the Chinese people began to express their supports for this new temporal system. The socialist Chinese people learnt how to accommodate their temporal rhythms to the seven-day’s circle in that they saw this circle as a representation of the advancement of socialism.

Mass media and folk arts represented the calendrical transformation. For example, Hou Baolin, a famous Chinese stand-up comedian in the 1950s, performed a comedy which depicted a lower-level staff who was always dreaming of dancing with girls on weekends. The word “weekends” was the most frequent one during the play. This comedy revealed that Chinese people’s temporal framework had already been organized by the language of “week.” The socialist Chinese’s familiarity with the distinction between weekdays and weekend was a representation and reinforcement of their understanding of the meaning of work for socialism. In fact, this comedy intended to despise the staff’s lazy personality that affected his contribution to the socialist construction. This example unmistakably indicated that the seven-day’s weekly rhythm was strongly attached and incorporated to the Socialist narratives.

By and large, the imposition of the seven-day’s weekly circle was successful because of the people’s conformity to the state’s temporal discourse. Working on weekdays and entertaining with comrades on weekends illustrated an ideal model of the socialist life style.

Traditional Holidays

The most compelling strategy that the socialist regime created was that rather than eradicate the old temporal system, they incorporated it into the new calendar with a socialist discourse.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese New Year and other old holidays were regarded as symbolic representations of the feudalist hangovers. There were “Four Olds,” i.e. Old Custom, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas (see Spence, 2001: 575). In order to eliminate these Four Olds, the government abandoned numerous practices that were tied to the past, including the celebrations for traditional holidays, such as the Tomb Sweeping Day, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Day. On January 30th, 1967, the government even announced not to celebrate the Chinese New Year any longer. However, people continued celebrating the Chinese New Year as well as other holidays underground (see Gao 2006, 2007). Given that, celebrations for old holidays did not completely disappear in China even during the most totalitarianism period. If the Communist Party continued this policy of eradication, they might encounter the same kind of failure that the precedent ruling party had experienced.

However, the strategy changed shortly later. Celebrations for traditional holidays were no longer forced to be abandoned. Instead, the government exerted a new approach to celebrate old holidays by incorporating its socialist narratives and symbols into the old holidays. For example, the Mid-Autumn day is a traditional festival for family reunion. By using a similar frame, the government modified the original practice to encourage every working unit to celebrate this unofficial festival with their socialist fellows. Accordingly, many other public parties and traditional activities have been organized in a new form, based on the socialist ideology. 104

Charles Stafford, in his field work in rural China, observed that the government effectively prevented the old pattern of family reunion by combining the Mid-Autumn day with the Teachers’ Day and encouraged socialist collective activities:

The day started with an early-morning assembly, in which a series of speeches praising education and current Communist Party leaders was made, between which prizes were distributed to teachers and to senior academics. … This ceremonial was followed, to my amazement, by the showing of a dubbed version of “The Professional”, starring Jean- Claude Belmondo. Then came an enormous luncheon banquet in the college’s dining hall. … The meal was followed in the afternoon by parties, held in each department of the college, which centred on very long variety “programs” (2000: 52-53).

In addition, old holidays were empowered to express themselves with a modern genre. For instance, a nationwide commemoration for the Premier Zhou Enlai on April 5th, 1976, showed the vitality of Chinese traditional holidays. April 5th is the traditional Tomb Sweeping Day, when Chinese people go to sweep tombs and memorize their ancestors. On that day of 1976, millions of citizens assembled in the Tiananmen Square to commemorate the beloved Premier Zhou. The more important reason that gathered people was their hatreds against the so called “Gang of Four,” four top officials of the central government, who were hated for their ambitiousness to grasp the central power and their threat to the state’s stability. That day was eventually characterized as the turning point of the Cultural Revolution (see Fairbank and Goldman, 1998: 404).

It seemed ironical that one traditional holiday played a central role in turning the Cultural Revolution into the end, while this revolution was initially carried out to eradicate traditional customs. What was more appealingly witnessed was the successful integration of the traditional sense of temporality and the socialist styles of activities. That is: marches, public assembling, slogans, and all the other patterns that people used in this occasion were actually shaped and used in a socialist frame. In fact, the Tomb Sweeping Day was an annual festival when people commemorated their ancestors within a limited family clan. Commemorative activities in this event, however, were far beyond the kinship circle. The Chinese people have learnt to use the socialist discourse to empower their traditional past.

In sum, as Myron Cohen (1994) suggests, the Nationalist’s failure was that they failed to incorporate the newly established national identity with the more genuine traditional markers of identity. Cohen sees the rejection of traditional elements as the primary reason that the Nationalists failed to gain legitimacy among general population. New rituals and holidays, from the Durkheimian perspective, must fail if they do not correspond to the general collectivity of the community. The Communist Party used the socialist paradigm to evoke most Chinese people’s identity vis-à-vis the world. People’s sense of the nationhood was paralleled with this ideological discourse. Therefore, the identity of the “socialist Chinese” was simultaneously promoted and promoting people’s practice of the new time system in holidays, commemorations as well as other temporal circles.

3: Cultural Chinese: The Revival of Traditions (1979-present)

After the Cultural Revolution which ended in 1976, especially after the year of 1979, the socialist ideology became questioned by the Chinese people, as the economic reform took place and the western cultural elements were prevalent among younger generations. Since the socialist ideology failed to continue shaping the Chinese people’s collective national 105 consciousness, the state searched for a new discourse to replace the old one. History and tradition are rediscovered accordingly. The old calendar and its traditional holidays, as a result, are in need because they, in this very period, serve as a tie between Chinese people and their sense of nationhood. The value of them became revived. The cultural meaning of these holidays is once again honored. The previous “Four Olds” have been entitled as “cultural heritage.” Culture, rather than the precedent modernity and ideology, has been associated with the narrative of nation to a large extent.

The frequency of the word “tradition” now far more exceeds the frequency in Mao’s era. According to the official web page of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China, holidays in the old time system are highly valued and named “traditions”:

Chinese traditional holidays have various styles and rich contents. They are one part of Chinese long course of history and culture. The process of the formation of those traditional holidays represents the accumulation of a nation’s historical culture. …vi

Also, more amazingly, in the same website of the central government, the key word “tradition” appears in 9594 web pages, whereas the key term “old holidays” only appears in 5 pages. Obviously, the word “old” has been devalued and replaced by “tradition.” This change is quite beneficial for the resurgence of the traditional holidays. Recalling the elimination of the “Four Olds” three decades ago, this change is incredible.

Being re-labeled from “Olds” to “traditions,” holidays in the lunar calendar are encouraged to celebrate in the civil sphere. Nowadays, every spring, Chinese people go to tombs to memorize their ancestors. Every summer, they eat “Zongzi” (glutinous rice dumpling) and play “dragon boats.” Every autumn, they reunite with their family, including parents and siblings in the Mid-Autumn day. Every winter, most Chinese people start celebrating Chinese New Year in “Xiao Nian,” the Small New Year’s Day, seven days before the New Year eve.

Chinese people have a strong sense of family reunion and separation (Stafford 2000). Their nostalgic sentiments are manifested during particular days, regulated by the annual calendar. This, according to Zerubavel, represents how the calendar socially articulates and organizes people’s temporal regularities. But the Chinese case is more characteristic in that Chinese people’s sentimental notion of reunion, which used to be structured by the old temporal frame, has been also organized by the Gregorian calendar. During every seven-day’s recession on The Labor’s Day and The National Day, which are based on the Gregorian calendar, families are united across the country. Nostalgic feelings are inevitable when people miss the family reunion. It is obvious that the tradition of family reunion in folk Chinese culture have diffused into and been practiced on the newly developed holidays. Therefore, the state has accomplished to integrate the two calendrical systems in a culturally consistent mode.

One interesting example occurred two years ago. In 2008, the Chinese government has for the first time designated three folk holidays as official holidays since 1911. These holidays include the Tomb Sweeping Day, the Dragon Boats Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Festival. As a result, the previous seven-day recess of the Labor’s Day has been shortened to a four-day one, instead. Ironically, there have been discontent voices about this calendar modification. Many people feel that it sets an obstacle for their family reunion. In this sense, the precedent boundary between traditional holidays and socialist holidays is blurring as 106 people’s the traditional, cultural and ideological notions of the calendars have been integrated and schematized. This irony ostensibly represents the state’s difficulty to manage common people’s temporalities. However, it actually reflects a great success of a new calendar system that the Communist regime has established.

Conclusion

This paper examines how the coexistence of two calendars has emerged and maintained in contemporary China. I argue that the ostensibly contrasting temporal systems have been actually integrated into a schematic ideological, cultural and social system. Despite the failure of the Nationalist Party that attempted to establish the Gregorian calendar, the Communist Party has accomplished this mission by introducing a cosmopolitan national identity, followed by the structural and cultural integration of the two calendars in contemporary China. The semiotic system of time, therefore, has been consistently regulated by and mutually dependent on the ongoing process of the development of national identity.

Table 1: National Identity The Gregorian Calendar People’s attitudes 1911-1949 Modern and Chinese Western Rejection 1949-1979 Socialist Chinese Cosmopolitan Acceptance 1979-present Cultural Chinese Just a calendar Integration

As Table 1 illustrates, the Nationalist Party’s imposition of the Gregorian calendar was contested by the people because it was incompatible with people’s rooted perception and practice of their temporal regularity. But the more fundamental reason was that the national identity that entailed both features of modernity and Chinese was inherently paradoxical at the first place. The Chinese people found it very difficult achieve an integral consciousness of being Chinese while simultaneously eradicating the Chinese traditions. The socialist regime succeeded in incorporating the Gregorian calendar into the Chinese practices by employing a cosmopolitan narrative. Joseph Levenson (1971) reveals that the reason for which the Communist Party integrated the nation with both discourses of modernism and nationalism resided in the “mission” assigned in terms of the world revolutionary enterprise. This revolutionary discourse gave the Chinese people a “leading role” for the worldwide Communist revolutions, thereby resolving the previous perceptual paradox. The disjunction between being a Chinese and being modern has dissolved.

Also, the three waves of the calendrical reform are not only contextually shaped. Rather, they are internally and mutually path-dependent. Olick argues that collective memories in different generations, albeit distinctive, have implicit coherence. Later genres of narratives are dependent on earlier ones. “[I]mages of the past depend not only on the relationship between past and present but also on the accumulation of previous such relationships and their ongoing constitution and reconstitution” (1999b: 382). The Chinese reform of calendar is to a large extent framed in this thesis. The Nationalist government, in spite of its failure, had succeeded in introducing modern patterns of political march, commemorative activities, national holidays and political speeches and propagandas to the Chinese people. Inheriting these earlier establishments, the socialist regime could develop the socialist identity effectively, thereby imposing the new temporal system into Chinese daily life. And when the third wave took place, it used the established new temporal regularity and vocabulary to re- incorporate traditional calendar and holidays into China. Old holidays have been given new values and meanings which are attached not only to present interests, but also to modern 107 vocabulary and genres. The revival of traditions in China, therefore, resulted from the reconnection to the past, and the connection with the two previous reforms.

Furthermore, although each particular calendarical reform is unique to each other, the Chinese example shows some illustrative implications for future studies. It demonstrates the cultural significance of cognitive frameworks for institutional reforms. If a calendar plays a critical role in our “mnemonic socialization” (Zerubavel 2003: 317), this process of socialization also establishes certain configurations for the calendar. This explains why the Chinese communist regime imposed its radical ideology not by obliterating the preexisting calendar but by incorporating it with the Chinese cultural elements. One regime cannot institutionally alter the nation’s temporal system without acknowledging the importance of the cognitive framework in which the temporal system is constituted.

In the 21th century, the Chinese people are no longer searching for the reconciliation between modernity and Chinese. Nor do they need to fulfill the leading role for the world revolutionary enterprise. They have, instead, established a stable temporal regularity with a clearly defined and practiced national identity. Nowadays, religious and folk holidays from the west become to be celebrated more enthusiastically than the socialist holidays. This transition represents a new mode of integration of Chinese perceptions of temporality and identity. The relationship between China and the West is now being framed in a reciprocal dialectic rather than a rhetorical dichotomy. 108

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