Chinese rush to wed before ‘widow’s year’

BEIJING – In many ways, the happy couple is the face of modern China. Liu Bo, 27, manages real estate in the Chinese capital’s red-hot property market. His fiancee, Guo Li, 27, sells wine, increasingly popular among the city’s emerging class of affluent professionals.

Yet Friday, the two were outside a drab government office, anxious to wed before the start of the Chinese New Year on Tuesday. The reason? An ancient superstition arising from a calendar quirk that makes the coming lunar year a “widow’s year.”

“It’s definitely something I considered. … I don’t believe in it too much, but it’s better to be safe than sorry,” Guo said, after waiting more than two hours.

Because of the vagaries of the Chinese lunar calendar, this new year will not contain the traditional start of spring known as “li chun”. For many here, that means the Chinese year 4702 will be cursed and, thus, a bad one in which to marry.

The sudden fuss over “li chun “is just the latest round in China’s long-running tussle between modernity and tradition. In the 1960s, Red Guard revolutionaries waged a vicious campaign against everything traditional, destroying antiquities and deriding the Confucian values that guided Chinese life for centuries.