Chinese traditionally stay home with all the four generations of the family to celebrate the Lunar New Year, but the stereotyped lifestyle is making way for diverse modern celebrations in the world's most populous nation, where families are smaller.

Shortly after his marriage, 24-year-old Yang Xincheng began to worry where he and his bride should spend the Chinese New Year's Eve. According to the Chinese custom, the couple should watch the new year in with the bridegroom's family, but the two did not have the heart to leave the bride's parents alone either, because both are the only child in their respective homes.

The three families eventually agreed to dine out together on New Year's eve, and the young couple spent the rest of the holidays on sightseeing tours away from home.

The number of one-child couples is soaring these days as the country's first one-child generation born in the late 1970s have come of age for marriage. Experts say families with at least one spouse being the only child will top 10 million in the coming decade.

As a result, the average size of Chinese families is shrinking. The 2000 national census shows a Chinese family has 3.6 members on average, down from the 3.97 reported in 1990 and 4.43 in 1982. Nuclear families with only parents and one child are mushrooming and are soon to make the majority of Chinese families.

Under such circumstances it's even harder for young couples to decide whether to celebrate the biggest family holiday with the husband's parents or the wife's.

"The Chinese Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, originated in the centuries-old agricultural society and was therefore based on male chauvinism, which was why young couples traditionally stay with the husband's parents for the holiday," said Li Xiaoyun, a Beijing-based sociologist. "But modernity is rapidly taking over traditions."

Even the elderly parents, particularly those in cities, are more tolerant of their children's absence even on the most festive occasion of the year.

Following China's reform and opening up in the late 1970s, the young people are more eager to leave home for more personal development opportunities. "The younger generation of today are more independent and prefer living on their own to enjoy life and avoid conflicts of ideas with the elders."

Even the traditional exchange of visits between friends and relatives is out of favor with many young people, who resort to text messages via cell phones or Internet or phone calls to convey their New Year greetings.

Beijing Mobile handled more than one billion outgoing short messages on Tuesday's Lunar New Year's Eve alone -- and the company estimated more than 10 billion text messages would be sent over the week-long holidays that end on Feb. 16, up 200 million from last year.

Short message service has become a major industry in China with more than 330 million mobile phone users sending 217.7 billion text messages last year.

High technologies have made it possible for parents to see their children on the computer screen and hear their voices -- even if they're half a world away. But a big family dinner at least on the New Year's Eve still tops the agenda of many Chinese, particularly rural residents.

"It's difficult to get a train ticket from Beijing to my home province during the pre-holiday passenger rush, but I have to go home even if I have to sit, or stand, through the journey," said Huang Yongfa, 31, a construction subcontractor from the eastern Anhui Province. "The Spring Festival is a special occasion for family reunions."

Huang, who had to stay up at the railway station to get a ticket early in February, said the several hundred rural workers that worked for him had all gone home in the three weeks before the Chinese New Year. "It may be an ordinary week-long holiday for the city people, but for us it's different. We all value the occasion for a big family reunion."

As the Chinese proverb goes, with elderly parents at home, a filial son must not travel far. As millions of people make their annual exodus from cities to their home provinces for the Chinese New Year, an increasing number of urban nuclear families also hit the rails -- but to places far away from home, and for holiday.

"Modernity may bring convulsive changes to our life, but family love must not fade away," said Dong Hairu, a veteran professor in Beijing. For most parents who are getting on in years, the best gift is still a dinner with all their children, said Dong. 

(Xinhua News Agency February 13, 2005)