Abstract: As a crucial part of cultures, festivals have the vitality of retaining and refreshing themselves. It is even more important to keep the national features and carry forward the national spirit, enhance national cohesion and national soft power, and promote the intercultural communication when modern society is multi-cultured and culturally globalized. This paper will briefly introduce the importance of the festival and the research trend of predecessors, then take important festivals of Chinese and western as example to analyze the influencing factors of festival formation so as to find the influencing elements to Chinese and western festivals. Finally it will explore the decline and revival of traditional festivals and the development of new festivals under the influence of globalization.

Key words: festival formation; Chinese and western; traditional festivals; new festivals

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Importance of National Festivals to the Construction of Culture-1

1.2 Previous Studies on Festivals-1

2. Chinese and Western Festivals-3

2.1 Introduction of Chinese Festivals-4

2.2 Introduction of Western Festivals-5

2.3 Influencing Factors of Festival Formation-6

2.3.1 Religious and Political Power-7

2.3.2 Economic and Societal Factors-8

2.3.3 Take Mid-Autumn Festival as an example-9

 2.3.3.1 Historical traces of Mid-Autumn festival-10

 2.3.3.2 Influencing Factors of Mid-Autumn Festival Formation-11

3. Status Quo of Festivals-13

3.1 Traditional festivals-13

3.1.1The decline of traditional festivals-13

3.1.2 The reason for decline-14

3.1.3 The revival of traditional festivals-16

3.2 Appearance of New Festivals-18

3.2.1. The National Day-18

3.2.2. The Singles day-19

3.3.3. Labor Day-19

4. Conclusion-20

References-21