For most Chinese people who work far from home, the Spring Festival holiday offers a rare time for a get-together with relatives and friends. This is also a good occasion for promoting social and interpersonal interactions.

Chinese people are famous for "scrambling with relatives and friends to pay the bill" for dinners in restaurants; normally, the elders are known to pick up the tab saying "it is my treat". But this seems to be changing, as Chinese people, particularly those born in the 1980s and 1990s, become more receptive to Western culture. The younger generations no longer detest sharing expenses. And even though not all choose to "go Dutch", an increasing number of them have become tolerant to such proposals.

However, it seems that "going Dutch" is not something all Chinese people can accept easily. The way a woman in Wuhan, Hubei province, recently reacted to going Dutch reflects how unpopular the concept of sharing the bill still is in Chinese society.

According to media reports, the woman surnamed Li, traditionally her brothers and sisters, who now have their own families, should take turns to pay for the annual family reunion dinner during the Lunar New Year, and this year one of her brothers should have footed the bill. But the brother proposed that all members of the big family, including the elders and children, pay their share for the dinner starting from this year.

She said that after the dinner, each diner paid about 100 yuan ($15.17) as part of his/her share and left the restaurant sullenly, regretting that the otherwise harmonious "family reunion dinner" atmosphere was ruined by the go-Dutch arrangement.

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