A Chinese city has banned schools from holding
Christmas events, state media reported on
Thursday, highlighting official suspicions about the
increasingly popular festival because of its foreign
origins.
China’s Christian population, currently estimated at
around 60 million, is rapidly growing and Christmas
is increasingly marked in the country ruled by the
officially atheist Communist Party.
But the government education bureau in Wenzhou,
an eastern Chinese coastal city sometimes called
“China’s Jerusalem” because of its large Christian
population, banned schools from holding
“Christmas-related” events, the Global Times
reported.
Local officials “hope schools can pay more
attention to Chinese traditional festivals instead of
Western traditions”, said the tabloid, which has
close ties to the Communist Party. Interest in Christmas has grown in China as an
occasion for shopping, with marketeers using
everything from saxophones and Smurfs to steam
trains to get consumers to open their wallets.
But authorities in Wenzhou this year launched a
demolition campaign aimed at local churches, with
more than 400 forced to remove visible crosses and
some completely destroyed.
The ban came as a university in central China
required students to watch a documentary about
Chinese sage Confucius instead of celebrating
Christmas.
“Be good sons and daughters of your country, stand
against kitsch Western holidays,” a banner on the
campus of Northwest University in the ancient city
of Xi’an said, according to photographs posted
online.
“Resist the expansion of Western culture,” read
another.
A university spokesman told the state-run
Guangming Daily that the school appealed to the
students to pay more attention to Chinese traditional
culture, and not to “idolise foreign festivals”.
The newspaper added: “Each year Christmas brings
debate, with one side saying that the festival can
bring a lot of new fun things, and another side
saying that we should not fawn over foreign things
and overlook Chinese traditional festivals.”

foreign or Western everybody needs a like little fun time

It's sad that it took atheistic communists to break the back of this late invention into Christianity.

Christians should whine if the country/city applies different standards to other religions

Not surprise at all...Because They don't even allow Muslims to observe Ramadan...Na dem sabi

I commend them. Middleast religions are cancers of the mind. They have learnt lessons from the total destruction of the African mind.

Nice move by Chinese government.

The way these chinese trample on human rights
Well they can do whatever they like in china

Na dem sabi