Let’s stop the polite nodding and get straight to the point: the push to rename Chinese New Year as the “Lunar New Year” isn’t just a matter of semantics—it’s a cultural heist.
To understand why this matters, we have to look at how history, power, and identity work. Think of it through the lens of the Roman Empire. Rome didn’t just vanish; its laws, its language, and its calendar laid the foundation for the world we live in today. When a successor state tries to take those Roman foundations and rename them to pretend they invented them, we call it what it is: a pretender.
The same logic applies here.
The Origin is the Authority
The calendar used to celebrate this holiday—the Nongli (literally Agricultural Calendar), or just the Chinese Calendar in English—was developed, refined, and exported by China. It is a lunisolar calendar (not purely lunar) that tracks the sun’s positions and the moon’s phases to govern agriculture and life for people in the Central Plains of China.
- The Blueprint: For millennia, neighboring regions adopted this system because of China’s cultural and scientific gravity.
- The Branding: Calling it “Lunar New Year” to be “inclusive” is like taking a classic Italian dish and calling it “Generic Wheat Noodle Night” just because other people started cooking it too.
No Room for Pretenders
In the historical context of empires, legitimacy comes from the source. Just as no “pretender successor” could rightfully claim the mantle of Rome while discarding the Roman identity, other cultures cannot claim the holiday’s roots while stripping the Chinese label from it.
While it is wonderful that Vietnam, Korea, and other nations have their own beautiful iterations of the festival (like Tet or Seollal), the global template is Chinese. Diluting the name doesn’t make the world more inclusive; it just makes their history more blurry, which was all written in Chinese and was part of China’s official history.
Why the Distinction Matters
When we use the term “Lunar New Year” as a mandatory replacement, we are participating in a quiet erasure.
- Technical Inaccuracy: As mentioned, it’s a lunisolar calendar. Calling it “Lunar” is scientifically lazy.
- Cultural Sovereignty: Traditions belong to the people who birthed them. You don’t rename St. Patrick’s Day to “Green Shirt Day” to make non-Irish people feel more “included.”
- The Roman Rule: If you are using the tradition, you are participating in a Chinese cultural legacy. Own it.
The Bottom Line
The Empire of Chinese cultural influence is still here. It lives in the red envelopes, the zodiac, the lion dances, and the calendar itself. We don’t need to sanitize the name to make it palatable for a global audience. It is Chinese New Year—and it’s time we stopped letting pretenders to the tradition dictate the vocabulary.