Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year?

Feb 19, 2026

In December 2023, the 78th United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution officially recognizing the Spring Festival (Lunar New Year) as a UN floating holiday. For most Chinese people, this didn’t really change much. Every year, China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala already features New Year greetings from people all over the world. Before the situation became so tense, there was even a wildly popular Taiwanese girl group, S.H.E., singing in a hit song that “the whole world is learning Chinese.” Chinese cultural confidence did not suddenly begin with “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” for sure. After COVID, however, it became a convenient target in Western societies.

As China came to be seen as a dominant regional power, its culture was pulled into scrutiny during the active construction of “Asian American” as a political and cultural identity in North America in the 21st century. What followed was, in many ways, a battle over cultural symbols. Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, and other communities began emphasizing: we are not an extension of Chinese culture - "Not all Asians are Chinese." Especially after Trump loudly repeated “Chinese Virus,” it's only natural to not wanting to be boxed into “Chinese” and turned into a target of hatred. Somehow, I can't stop thinking about the Japanese fella being violently attacked on the streets of London during the pandemic. One can’t help wondering whether, in a darkly ironic way, this reversed into a distorted realization of Japan’s wartime “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

From my admittedly incomplete observations on platforms like Instagram and Xiaohongshu, Korean Americans seem particularly invested in this debate. Just a few days ago, I saw a Chinese international student in the U.S. arguing with a Korean classmate over whether “Chinese New Year” and “Lunar New Year” are the same thing, so intensely that one threatened to report the other. Of course, the de-Sinicization of East Asia especially in Korea has been underway for decades. On the one hand, this is part of the unavoidable path of modern nation-building; on the other, it is a natural outcome of mass communication. Chinese characters are a complex system, hard to learn and write, and only available to ruling class. After the 20th century, Korea systematically removed Chinese characters from everyday writing and elevated Hunminjeongeum (Hangul) into a core national symbol: a script of the people, and a symbol of resistance against external cultural hegemony. A nation-state that claims “the people” as its subjectivity inevitably lowers the threshold of knowledge so ordinary people can participate in writing history and debating social issues. This simplification helped Korea’s popular culture industry align with the global market and receive strong positive feedback.

In a master’s course I took more than a decade ago at the University of Westminter which I nearly failed, I learned that Korea joined the WTO in the early 1990s, that KOICA received training through the UN system, and that its media industry went through comprehensive de-state-control and privatization. Korean popular culture gradually developed a production structure that could plug directly into Western markets. Its pop culture is largely de-historicized: audiences don’t need to know Korean history, institutions, or cultural background. Netflix’s hit film K-Pop Demon Hunters is a perfect example. If you have a child over three years old, I am sure you know exactly what I mean.

And yet, even with all this success, Korean popular culture has never fully escaped the psychological trauma of having been historically overshadowed by China. For peninsular civilizations, it is hard to avoid the uncomfortable historical fact that even surnames were introduced alongside Chinese characters, bureaucracy, and genealogical systems. The prevalence of surnames like Kim, Lee, and Park stems from the fact that only aristocrats originally had surnames; when surnames later became universal, ordinary people chose from the few available options. I once saw a Douyin program where Chinese hosts explained to Koreans what their names “mean” in Chinese. The creator was clearly overflowing with pride in Chinese culture. There are countless similar videos, and this isn’t limited to Koreans; any foreigner should be shocked by the sophistication of Chinese culture. The fact is that the Chinese language system has been hollowed out at the semantic level in Korea, retaining mostly sound and form. Of course, Korea wasn’t the first to do this. Japan had been doing it from the 8th to the 19th century. Japan even officially stopped celebrating the Chinese New Year in the early Meiji period (1873), which is why Japnese is absent from the Chinese New Year vs. Lunar New Year debate. Wise move.

At its core, this debate is about competing for limited subjectivity within Western dominant culture. No one in China or Korea argues about this — because no one speaks English in their own country. In China, we say Chun Jie; in Korea, Seollal; in Vietnam, Tết. None of these words are actually used by English-speaking societies. So this is fundamentally a war over recognition. When recognition is scarce, groups are pushed into zero-sum games. the point Charles Taylor makes in The Politics of Recognition. From the Chinese side, the technical argument is that the traditional calendar used in China is not purely lunar but lunisolar: months follow moon phases, while years are aligned to the solar cycle through the 24 solar terms and leap months.

But here, I’ll make a unilateral declaration: none of this really matters. No one wants to celebrate New Year in a detention center, and no one wants to argue over technical details on the way to a gas chamber. Years ago, in a China Media class, an Italian teaching assistant showed an ad for Chinese dairy products on a London double-decker bus — entirely in Chinese, not a single English word. She asked what effect the ad was supposed to achieve. I asked her, from an Italian perspective, whether foreigners could even tell the difference between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scripts. She shook her head. Then it’s hard to say what effect was achieved at all. Therefore, from the standpoint of minority solidarity, I lean toward Lunar New Year. My colleague Xin Zhao recently published an article on anti-Asian hate. When people resist discrimination, they often intentionally downplay specific ethnic identities and form a pan-Asian identity. I would strongly suggest that Asians join the “brown” coalition. As the 'asian' comedian Joe Wong once joked:

"Nobody in America who’s a person of color is exactly the color they’re assigned to… we’re basically just different shades of Mexicans."

Happy Lunar New Year.