Writer Feng Jicai explains the Chinese Lunar New Year

For many Western readers, the Chinese Spring Festival may appear as little more than red lanterns, fireworks and family gatherings. Yet within Chinese culture it is in fact the Chinese New Year — the beginning of a new cycle of time, a cultural river flowing unbroken for thousands of years. In our era, the writer Feng Jicai is among the few who have sought to explain this river to the world.

Born into a well-established financial family in Tianjin, China, Feng Jicai first gained recognition as a writer and painter. Over time, however, his role evolved. He gradually became a guardian of China’s cultural heritage and a public intellectual devoted to preserving what modernization threatens to erase. Now in his eighties, he continues to write, research, and travel into the field, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese cultural preservation.

His work spans literature, art, and cultural policy. Feng founded and leads the Feng Jicai Institute of Literature and Arts at Tianjin University, where he serves as professor and doctoral supervisor. He has held senior roles in national literary and folk-arts organizations and has long participated in expert committees dedicated to the protection of intangible cultural heritage and traditional villages. Beyond formal titles, his influence lies in shaping how modern China understands the value of its own living traditions.

In recent years, his cultural vision has taken physical form in a museum. The Tianjin University Feng Jicai Museum, which opened in 2025, occupies roughly 12,000 square meters and is housed in two carefully restored twentieth-century heritage buildings. It is the first museum in mainland China named after a living figure known simultaneously as a writer, painter and cultural-heritage protector.

Its collections include thousands of artworks, historical artifacts and documents, as well as manuscripts from international figures — among them letters by Victor Hugo, a signed piece by Leo Tolstoy and handwritten musical scores by Franz Liszt. The museum is more than a personal archive; it embodies a belief that literature and folk memory belong to the shared history of society.

His family connections also reveal deeper historical roots. The Gu family of his wife played a notable role in early Chinese national finance, founding Chung Foo Bank in 1916 — at a moment when global financial systems were being reshaped by the First World War.

Another prominent family figure, Sun Jianai (1827–1909), served as an imperial tutor and educational reformer in the late Qing dynasty. While Europe was entering the late stages of industrialization and America was living through its Gilded Age, Sun helped establish the Imperial University of Peking — the origin of today’s Peking University — advocating a philosophy that combined Chinese learning with Western knowledge.

Such a legacy forms part of the intellectual background that shaped Feng’s understanding of cultural continuity. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Feng Jicai’s lifelong mission has centered not on palace art or elite culture, but on the living traditions of ordinary people.

And among these traditions, the Spring Festival stands at the center. As China’s New Year, the Spring Festival carries a meaning comparable, in some ways, to both New Year celebrations and the Christmas season in the West. It marks not simply a holiday, but a symbolic renewal of family and time itself. Its origins stretch back more than three thousand years to early agricultural societies — roughly the period of the late Bronze Age in the West, long before the rise of the Greek city-states.

During the Han dynasty (around the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, contemporaneous with the Roman Empire), the festival began to take recognizable shape. By the Tang and Song dynasties (7th to 13th centuries, parallel to medieval Europe), rituals became more structured. By the Ming and Qing periods (14th to 19th centuries, alongside the European Renaissance and Enlightenment), many of the customs familiar today had largely crystallized.

In the modern calendar, the date shifts each year according to the lunar cycle; in 2026, the Chinese New Year fell on February 17, marking the beginning of the Spring Festival season.

Customs include posting spring couplets — auspicious phrases written on red paper and affixed to doors and windows as blessings for the year ahead. On Lunar New Year’s Eve, families observe shousui, or “keeping the vigil,” gathering for a reunion dinner. Dumplings, symbolizing unity, are essential; so too are chicken and fish. In Mandarin, “chicken” echoes the sound of “good fortune,” while “fish” is a homonym for “surplus,” expressing the wish for abundance year after year.

Children set off fireworks in courtyards. In some regions, long strings of firecrackers are lit from the innermost room of the house and allowed to crackle all the way to the front gate, symbolically driving away misfortune. On the first day of the new year, families pay visits to relatives and friends, exchanging blessings. Elders present children with red envelopes containing money — tokens of protection and goodwill. Together, these customs form the living core of China’s New Year.

For Feng Jicai, the essence of the festival lies not in outward spectacle but in a philosophy of life itself. As he says, “During the days of the New Year, life becomes idealized, and ideals become part of everyday life.” He also describes the New Year as “an ideal striving to become lived reality, and a life striving toward the ideal.” In this view, food, color, and ritual are never merely decorative — they are symbols through which ordinary life is elevated into meaning.

He often emphasizes that the Spring Festival possesses a deeply structured ritual system. Ancestor remembrance, reunion dinners, and shared ceremonies may appear simple, yet they function much like Christmas or Thanksgiving in the West — renewing collective memory through family ritual.

For decades, Feng has worked to bring international recognition to the festival. His advocacy helped lead to a milestone in 2024, when the Spring Festival was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. For him, this was not merely a national achievement but a contribution to global cultural diversity.

He frequently notes that foreigners do not need complex explanations to understand the festival. Participation itself is enough. Through it, one can feel the Chinese emphasis on family, respect for elders, and the pursuit of peace and harmony — values that are ultimately universal.

Today, Spring Festival celebrations can be seen in London, New York, Paris, and Sydney, forming one of the world’s largest annual cultural migrations. It is a moment when people from different backgrounds share a common wish: the chance to begin again.

In an age of globalization, many traditional festivals risk being reduced to commercial symbols. What Feng Jicai seeks to protect, however, is the deeper thread beneath them — ensuring that culture is not merely displayed, but lived.

Perhaps the true power of the Spring Festival lies not in fireworks or spectacle, but in its reminder that, no matter how the world changes, human beings must return — again and again — to family, memory, and hope. And figures like Feng Jicai, quietly and persistently, help guard that shared humanity along the long river of time.

Jeffrey Sze is Reichenau’s ambassador for Arts, culture and tourism and chairman of Habsburg Asia. He serves as general partner of Archduke United LPF and Asia Empower LPF, focusing on cross-border institutional investment at the intersection of art, finance and regulated digital innovation, including AI and digital assets. In 2017, he was involved in securing one of Switzerland’s early cryptocurrency exchange licences.