This paper presents a post-modern discussion of the playful re- creation of Chinese New Year “cards” by Chinese students through the electronic medium of the Internet. “Re-creation” here refers to two distinctive, yet related styles of performance. Firstly, it describes the recycling of traditional Chinese motifs and large-character texts –lanterns, wishes for good fortune in the coming year and so on– from year to year in different combinations to create novel greetings. Secondly, it signifies the increasingly popular practice of incorporating festive symbols from other cultures, such as menorahs and Christmas trees, into the electronic greetings. Through the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary, borrowed texts, the seemingly disordered pastiches are transformed into uniquely Chinese expressions of celebration. Re-creation and transmission of these greetings also requires a certain degree of technical performance on the part of senders and receivers before they can fully participate in this playful discourse. This paper also discusses how Chinese-language freeware and shareware programs must often be downloaded and locally installed by users before these encoded texts can be translated and displayed in readable Chinese characters. At another level of performance, anonymous Chinese computer artists may use some of these or similar tools to actually design greetings which then have the potential for global distribution and reproduction. “The Ten Thousand-Dimensional Web of Heaven and Net on Earth” (WWW) is quickly becoming an integral feature of many Chinese students' intra-cultural communication, a vast rhetorical surface where one can do anything from peruse a classical novel to select a clever greeting to send to an old friend now halfway around the world.
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Seana Kozar (2006) studied this question.