Westerners return home to reunite with their parents during Christmas. In China, the Spring Festival serves a similar purpose, as family reunion is the shared theme between Western Christmas and Chinese New Year.
On 4 December, the social practices of celebrating the traditional Chinese New Year, submitted by China, were inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity during the 9th Session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Paraguay. This announcement undoubtedly heightened the cultural identity of Chinese people worldwide.
During my student years, I always thought that the Spring Festival holiday—with family, delicious food, red envelopes, and gatherings with friends—was universally loved. However, after working for several years and hearing more and more colleagues share their reasons for disliking going home for the New Year, I realised that the traditional Chinese New Year is far from an enjoyable experience for many young people. Today, I want to discuss why the Chinese New Year has become such a heavy burden for the younger generation and why many of them are reluctant to return home for the holiday.
If the New Year were simply an ordinary holiday that allowed workers to escape their gruelling schedules, get proper rest, have heartfelt conversations with family, and enjoy drinks with friends, I believe no one would dislike it or feel stressed. However, the reality of Chinese New Year is quite different. For contemporary young people, returning home for the New Year often comes with numerous pain points, both physically and mentally.
For those working in major cities with family homes in smaller towns, counties, or rural areas, celebrating the New Year means scrambling for train tickets, often ending up with standing tickets that require enduring hours or even an entire day of travel just to reach their hometown’s train station. Many still face long and tiring car rides to their family homes afterward, spending a considerable amount on transportation costs to participate in the world’s largest annual human migration event—China’s Spring Festival travel rush.
This expensive and exhausting journey forces many to leave the comfort of their rented flats in big cities and return to living conditions they are no longer accustomed to. In some families, children’s bedrooms are converted into storage rooms after they start working, requiring them to clean up and settle into makeshift accommodations upon returning home. For many, this makes going home feel like staying at a temporary hostel.
The experience often involves dietary clashes as well. Many families celebrate with an extravagant New Year’s Eve dinner, filling the table with chicken, duck, fish, and meat, only to eat leftovers for the following days. Some stews even last until the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the New Year. Young people struggle to understand why, in an era of material abundance and convenience—when supermarkets and malls are open even on New Year’s Eve—stockpiling food and eating leftovers remain unchanged traditions.
However, these issues of cost, inconvenience, and discomfort pale in comparison to the mental burdens. Chinese New Year also represents generational control, economic expectations, financial comparisons, pressure to marry, and even forced blind dates. Some netizens summarise Chinese New Year with these phrases: “Three sentences about money, four about marriage, five about saving, six about being sensible, seven about how hard it was to raise you, eight about how someone else’s child excels, and nine about how you must strive harder.”
The internet even features “New Year Anxiety Level Tests.” Level 1 anxiety is waking up to find a living room full of relatives; Level 2 is visiting unfamiliar relatives with your parents; Level 3 is being forced to perform talents for relatives; Level 4 is being pressured to toast at the dinner table; Level 5 is not earning enough yet still needing to give red envelopes to younger family members; Level 6 is facing elaborate matchmaking and marriage pressure from parents and relatives; Level 7 is being interrogated about your salary and savings; Level 8 is dealing with mischievous children invading your room; and the top-level anxiety is walking past the watchful eyes of the most elite intelligence network in the world—the elders chatting downstairs or in the village square.
Due to this anxiety, internet platforms are flooded with “comebacks for relatives” guides around the New Year, offering humorous tips for “elegant self-rescue” during family gatherings and providing a light-hearted way to relieve young people’s tension.
At home, you can’t complain, express exhaustion, talk about relationships, or gossip. So what remains in the New Year that can truly energise young people?
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