From mop:
Picture from Flickr
According to a report from Taiwan’s Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) on Feb 14, in President Obama’s first global Lunar New Year greeting, he used the term “Asian Lunar New Year”, instead of the frequently used term “Chinese New Year.”
Another Taiwanese newspaper, China Times, reported that the term “Chinese New Year” had been used in the US for a long time; changing it to Asian Lunar New Year, a politically correct name, actually sounds awkward and reminds people the debate over the English naming of Lunar New Year.
Controversy over the official name of Lunar New Year arose more than twenty years ago. Although Lunar New Year was a festival shared among many Asian ethnicities, American often just called it Chinese New Year, which caused protest from Korean Americans.
History
More than 100 years ago during the Qing Dynasty of China, a large number of Chinese came to the US to build railways and since then, the custom of celebrating Lunar New Year spreaded. This is the main reason why Americans call Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year.
While Koreans started immigrating to the US during the Korean War in 1950s, and Vietnamese came to the US after the Vietnam War in 1960s, Lunar New Year was no longer celebrated just by Chinese but also by many other Asian ethnicities.
With more and more other Asian ethnicities living in America, the name Chinese New Year started causing a lot political debates and protests led mainly by Korean Americans.
The naming actually went through many different versions. As Korean Americans argued Chinese New Year is not a good representation of their festival, many US universities started changing the name to Chinese-Korean New Year, which also raised protest that the sequence should be Korean-Chinese instead. Later, some people suggested “Asian New Year”; however, other Asian ethnicities, like Japanese and Thai, which don’t celebrate Lunar New Year, claimed this had nothing to do with their New Year. After rounds and rounds of debates and protest, the term “Asian Lunar New Year” finally emerged as being (politically) acceptable by different Asian Americans.
Loading ...
Who created lunar calendar? Stupid koreans?
[...] For the majority of China’s 5,000 years of recorded history, the great country has been agrarian (that is to say, agriculturally based, both in economics and in culture). The lunar calendar has always been the dominating force in daily life because people need it to figure out what time to sow a new year’s crops. China isn’t the only country that had been using this kind of calendar, so we think that calling the festival the “Lunar New Year” avoids the cultural misunderstandings that it is a Chinese-only thing (after all, Japan, Vietnam, Korea and other countries and expatriates also mark the festival). On this point, many Asian communities thanked President Obama for renaming it the “Asian New Year” in his first Lunar New Year address. [...]
Shouldn’t it just be called the Spring Festival? Or doesn’t that work either? It is not called Chinese New Year in China is it?
People use Spring Festival and New Year interchangeably in China.
I think it’s more of an issue in the US where different ethnicity live together and share the same festival.
Keep this simple and call this “Lunar New Year”.