For some 2,000 years, Chinese are said to have marked the Duanwu festival that falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of Chinese lunar calendar by eating triangles of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and racing special canoes to commemorate the death of a persecuted poet who drowned himself. After the 1949 communist revolution, people have also gone to work in fields and factories as normal during the festival.
It has now become a real holiday but migrants workers idling on the beach this week in the city of Zhuhai, next to Macao, profess ambivalence.
“It is nice to have the new holiday but we can't do much with it,” says a man giving his family name as Dai as he munched on crisps.