Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 3...

Stolen Seasons: How China Turned a Shared Festival Into Its Own

Lunar New Year has never belonged to a single nation. Vietnamese families celebrate Tết, Koreans observe Seollal, and communities across Southeast Asia welcome the new lunar cycle with rituals shaped by their own histories. What they share is a regional inheritance, not a debt to China, even though China has often framed the season as exclusively Chinese.

The origin story looks less like a single “Chinese tradition” and more like a shared regional pattern built around the farming year. Early Han society formed in the Yellow River basin with dry field staples like millet and wheat, while many rituals now treated as Lunar New Year essentials align more naturally with wet rice cultures south of the Yangtze. In that southern world, seasonal transition, harvest gratitude, earth spirit worship, and ancestral feasting were already part of community life long before Han expansion absorbed those regions. Over time, what had multiple roots was repackaged as a single label, and the label became the story.

That matters because naming is power, and power often works through erasure. Once the holiday is constantly labeled “Chinese New Year,” Vietnam and Korea are quietly repositioned as cultures that merely received their most intimate rituals from China. This is not just semantic. A culture described as derivative is easier to politically pressure, because people are nudged to feel historical indebtedness toward the nation that claims ownership of their shared traditions. Erasure does not always look like censorship. Sometimes it looks like a “normal” name that leaves everyone else unnamed.

In the modern era, the most effective vehicle for this narrative is often not diplomacy. It is entertainment. Celebrities with massive youth followings post “Chinese New Year” greetings that flatten Tết into a Chinese label, with no recognition of Vietnam’s own name, rituals, or cultural framing. Repeated across platforms by admired public figures, the phrase becomes a default. It stops sounding like a claim and starts sounding like reality.

[I] Psychology has a name for this. The illusory truth effect describes how repetition increases perceived truth, even when the statement is inaccurate. Over time, the language itself does the work. What began as a casual caption becomes a cultural reclassification. The more often a generation sees the label, the more normal it feels, until correcting it starts to look like “overreacting,” and accepting it starts to look like “being reasonable.” That is Erasure in its most efficient form: not an argument you lose, but a premise you stop questioning. [II] 

 [III] When young Vietnamese fans defend idols who erase Tết under the banner of “Chinese New Year,” they are not only defending a celebrity. They are rehearsing a worldview in which their own culture is secondary, and where the right to name their most important festival no longer belongs to them. The most complete form of assimilation is not forced compliance. [IV] It is voluntary adoption. A generation that internalizes “Chinese New Year” as the default label is a generation that has accepted, in everyday language, what centuries of domination struggled to achieve.

Extra notes

Geography and agriculture tell a sharper version of the same story. Early Han society grew from the Yellow River basin, where dry-field farming dominated and staples like millet and wheat matched the climate. That setting does not naturally produce many of the wet-rice seasonal ideas tied to Lunar New Year practices in the south, such as rice-cycle symbolism, harvest offerings, earth spirit worship, and communal ancestral feasting.

Those rhythms fit far more closely with the world south of the Yangtze, where wet-rice agriculture shaped both livelihood and ritual long before Han expansion fully absorbed the region. Vietnamese traditions like the bánh chưng legend, associated with the Hùng Kings and steeped in wet-rice symbolism, read less like a borrowed northern custom and more like continuity from older southern agricultural civilizations.

Even classical texts complicate the usual Sinocentric narrative. Confucius, in records associated with ritual practice, describes southern farming peoples holding seasonal festivals around the lunar cycle to mark agricultural transition. The tone is observational, not proprietary. He is noticing a practice, not claiming it as the default “Chinese” norm. That detail matters, because it aligns with a broader historical pattern: as Han power expanded southward through centuries of conquest, settlement, and administrative absorption, local customs were increasingly folded into imperial culture, renamed, standardized, and then retroactively presented as native inheritance. 

[Adapted from Book of Rites and Cơ Sở Văn Hóa Việt Nam]