Chinanews, Beijing, Feb. 12 – A recent survey shows that many Chinese feel that they will have a busy time and spend a lot of money during the upcoming Spring Festival (lunar New Year). Some people worry about the tight social gatherings that they will have during the big holiday.
Although it is good news that train ticket price won’t be raised this year, the bad news is that many Chinese will still have a hard time buying a ticket home, and getting a ticket home now becomes one of the most important things in weeks to come, according to a survey jointly carried out by the China Youth Daily Social Investigation Center, Tencent website’s information center, and the information center from Sina website.
In the survey, 33.2% of the people say what they fear most now is that they can’t get a ticket to go home.
Almost everyone has a lot of expenses to cover during the big holiday season: ticket fares, Spring Festival shopping, New Year presents and New Year gift money for children. In the survey, 49.5% of the people say they plan a “glorious” return and will take lots of money and gifts back home for their friends and relatives. To these people, since they might not be able to go back once in a year or even for several years, it might be good “to be generous and act like a spending fool”.
How much money will people spend for the festival? Most people think that their holiday spending might equal 1-2 months of their salary; 31.7% say they would spend less than 3,000 yuan; 49.4% say their holiday expenditure might be between 3,000-10,000 yuan, and 11.0% say it might even be more than 10,000 yuan.
43.9% of the respondents feel they will have a busy time during the holiday, since, as some of them say, “Although the whole holiday lasts for seven days, we normally spend only 2-3 days staying with the family and for the rest of the time, we might either go out to attend some social gatherings, eating with friends or colleagues, playing mahjong, or doing some other things. So the long holiday will surely pass quickly.”
The survey also reveals that 31.2% of the people fear about the social gatherings they will have to attend during the holiday. For those who go back home, they need to find time to pay New Year calls to each of their relatives, and drink up all the wine that people toast to them. For those who don’t plan to go home this year, they still need to give much thought to finding out the most appropriate gifts for their parents and the parents of their spouses, because in choosing the gifts, they should make sure the gifts are nice-looking, can make the parents and the parents of their spouses feel equally treated, and are equally good as the other gifts that their sisters or brothers have bought for their parents.
