The Manifestations And Connotations Of The Spring Festival Culture In China And Vietnam

This thesis firstly researches the history of the Spring Festival activities, and then analyses the causes of the differences according to the comparisons of etiquettes, activities, and cultural ideologies related to the Spring Festival between in China and in Vietnam. The last part explores the forms and contents of the Spring Festival including heritage and innovation.China and Vietnam have a friendly relationship and we can see that Vietnamese etiquettes, traditions and literatures have been influenced by the Chinese, especially the traditional culture. The Spring Festival is one of the representative traditional cultural festivals both in China and Vietnam.It has many cultural forms and abundant contents including national characteristics from inside to outside. Both the Spring Festival cultures show no difference in their moralities and etiquettes, such as the worshipping of ancestors, the New Year’s Eve dinner, the New Year greetings and money given to children as a lunar New Year gift. Yet it differs in the forms of the Spring Festival customs such as the Chinese year of the rabbit and the Vietnamese year of the cat, Chinese dumplings and Vietnamese rice-pudding (zongzi), going to the temple to make wishes and a five-fruit-plate. These differences reflect the connotation, natural environment and the influences of the foreign culture of the two countries.The thesis describes the details of Chinese and Vietnamese the Spring Festival from the aspects of etiquettes, the Spring Festival activities, culture ideologies, culture communications and culture characters. It also explains the differences between the two countries’ ethnic characteristics andethnic styles and features. Finally, it explores in detail the Chinese and Vietnamese contemporary era’s Spring Festival culture, such as New Year of fitness, the New Year of traveling, New Year of charity and New Year of education, in order to increase the understand and distinctiveness of the Chinese and Vietnamese related to the Spring Festival culture. The aim is to unearth and develop the Spring Festival cultural value of both countries and to increase custom cultural exchange between in China and in Vietnam.