Halloween

Like their peers in the West, many children on the mainland had an enjoyable weekend as they wore colorful and cute costumes and went trick-and-treating to celebrate Halloween. But a father in Sichuan province in southwestern China said he was concerned that western celebrations are increasingly diluting traditional festivals in the ancient civilization. The comments reignited a debate about if it was acceptable to celebrate Western festivities in China. In a video that went viral on China’s Twitter-like Weibo on Monday, a man scolded a staff member at an after-school training organization in Mianyang city for celebrating Halloween, saying this was “ruining the positive energy [of the count

Halloween revelers in the central Chinese city of Wuhan flocked to the Happy Valley amusement park to watch a parade on October 29, 2020. The celebrations took place months after the city that was the initial epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic continues to recover from a strict lockdown to fight the spread of the coronavirus that causes the disease.  Video source: AP/Newsflare

When Wang Guyue’s five-year-old boy stepped into his English-language class this week, he was greeted by a room full of princesses, ghosts and pumpkins. Every year, this extracurricular training school in Shanghai turns Halloween-themed. All the children don costumes and make-up, and trick-or-treating activities are held. “My son is afraid of ghosts, so I dressed him up as a Chinese swordsman,” Wang said. She thinks it’s a good idea to celebrate Western holidays so that the children can learn the culture as well as the language.  For many young Chinese, October is filled with Halloween celebrations even as anti-Western holiday rhetoric crops up every year, with some saying dressing up as gho

Halloween is here, and that means it’s time for grisly tales, ghost stories and haunted locales. The city of Hong Kong has a long and tumultuous history – which means it’s littered with ghost stories and claims of the paranormal. Here are five of the best ghost stories and haunted places in Hong Kong. 1) Nam Koo Terrace Nam Koo Terrace is famous for being the most haunted apartment building in Hong Kong. It’s thought to have been a military brothel for Japanese troops during their occupation of the city in the 1940s. According to legends, Chinese women were taken there as “comfort women,” and often tortured or killed by soldiers. Some say ghosts of the women haunt the building and their cri