With the hope of sharing in the global celebration in February, the Chinese Foreign Ministry conveyed its thanks to the UN for including the Lunar New Year in its “floating holiday” schedule. In Chinese custom, the Year of the Dragon will be celebrated at the next Lunar New Year, which is anticipated to begin on February 10, 2024. In China, this holiday is usually more cherished than the obligatory celebrations held in October to commemorate the establishment of the Communist Party.
There are ten holidays per year for UN employees (nine fixed and one floating), and no UN organizations are required to convene during those periods.
In January 2020, hordes of people left the Chinese metropolis for destinations all over the globe despite mounting evidence of an infectious respiratory disease. Authorities maintained that the novel coronavirus could not be transmitted from person to person as they sought to shatter the record for the biggest dinner in the world, inviting 130,000 guests to dine family-style in an indoor, highly infectious environment.
The Communist Party enforced a harsh mass lockdown on those who remained in Wuhan after 5 million of the 11 million residents had departed for the Lunar New Year break, according to Mayor Zhou Xianwang.
In order to prevent workers from being forced to work on particular days, the “floating holiday” classification encourages UN officials to plan activities around the day. The “floating” ensures that the United Nations does not entirely close down on such days for those who do not celebrate the holidays, as it contains delegates from almost every nation on Earth.
Chinese state media hailed Friday’s United Nations General Assembly recognition of the Lunar New Year as a triumph for the Communist Party’s “Global Civilization Initiative,” a nebulous program unveiled in March with the purported goal of fostering cultural variety and tolerance.
In East Turkistan, a region annexed by China and referred to as the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” in Han, a systematic genocide against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples is underway. Yet, the U.N. celebrates China.
