Halloween used to counter rising stress levels

In the Joy City shopping mall in Beijing's downtown commercial center of Xidan, Guo Jing picks up a Halloween mask and puts it over her head.

"Do I look scary enough?" she asks one of her friends.

Guo has been busy costume-hunting for a Halloween party, even though the 23-year-old has no idea what the festival means."I just want to relax and have fun at the party," she says.

Guo works at a publishing press in the capital, and frequent overtime work has placed her under a lot of stress.

Halloween, a contraction of All Hallows Even and also known as All Hallows Eve, is an annual celebration observed in a number of countries on Oct 31, the eve of the Christian feast of All Hallows, or All Saints. Many scholars say it was originally influenced by Western European harvest festivals and festivals of the dead with possible pagan roots.

Like Guo, many young Chinese celebrate Halloween as an excuse to relax from daily pressures.

In department stores, supermarkets and wholesale markets, Halloween costumes and masks are on show. At Taobao.com, China's largest online shopping platform, there are 240,000 Halloween items for sale.

The owner of an online shop called Qianqifang House Decoration on the platform has sold more than 5,000 Halloween cloaks in a month, among other items.

Cao Baoming, an expert on folk customs, says celebrating Western festivals such as Halloween has become a trend in China but that cultural connotations embedded in such events have been neglected.

Few Chinese who celebrate Halloween know the festival is an occasion when people stock up on food and worship the dead to survive winter.

Cao says: "Trick-or-treat is not popular in China, and young people are just making use of the occasion for parties and other recreational activities to reduce stress."

Some 75 percent of Chinese workers are feeling more pressure this year than last, according to a poll conducted in September by serviced office space provider Regus.

The survey, which canvassed the opinions of more than 16,000 workers worldwide, put the global average at 48 percent, concluding that China had the highest rate of increasing stress levels of all the countries polled. The leading causes of stress were identified as employment, finances and customers.

While the result remains controversial in China due to Japan's greater reputation for stressed-out employees, Chinese workers are experiencing more pressure from work, said Xiao Minzheng, director of Peking University's Center for Human Resource Development and Management Research.

The poll found stress levels rose for 45 percent of workers in Japan and 58 percent of those in Germany, which came second in Regus' rankings.

Fu Cheng, a sociologist with Jilin Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, says young people celebrating Western festivals were mostly born in the 1980s. They have to face pressure from work, supporting their family, housing loans and other factors.

Apart from while-collar workers, university students also like celebrating Hallo-ween. Wang He, a senior at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, capital of Jilin province, was going to a Halloween ball to escape the pressures of job hunting.

"I want to be a vampire," says Wang, adding she wants to have fun in the limited free time she has on campus.

Zheng Xiaohua, director with the Psychology Institute of Changchun, says festival celebrations have become an important way for young people to release stress.

But it should not be the only way. Zheng advises people to expand their interests to other areas such as traveling, reading and walking.

(China Daily 11/01/2012 page5)