CHINA:A cacophony of fireworks greeted the Year of the Pig in Beijing yesterday as residents in the Chinese capital chased away any lingering bad spirits and celebrated the new moon in boisterous fashion.
Fortune tellers say this is a "golden pig" year, which comes around once every 60 years, so the Chinese welcomed it in particularly exuberant style, rattling the windows of downtown apartments and courtyard homes with the bangs and whistles of millions of fireworks.
Firecrackers are a traditional way of celebrating Chinese New Year and there were over 380,000 boxes of firecrackers sold officially, compared with 240,000 boxes for the same period last year, which was the first year fireworks were allowed in the inner city.
Astrologers say that people born during the Year of the Pig are lucky, as a pig is a symbol of plenty, as well as of fertility, and many get married during the "Year of the Pig" to guarantee healthy, wealthy offspring.
Famous pigs include Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Woody Allen, David Letterman, Elton John and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Competing with the din of the fireworks were the trills of mobile phones as people sent text messages to each other wishing a prosperous new year.
Keen to stress their men of the people credentials, China's top leaders took to the countryside to spend time with some of the hundreds of millions of farmers who have been left behind by the country's economic boom.
President Hu Jintao fried dough twists, ate steamed potatoes and cut paper window decorations with poor farmers in the village of Daping in the northwestern province of Gansu.
"Dear villagers, I come to greet you a happy new year. I visited Daping eight years ago. Today, I am very pleased to see lots of changes. New houses are erected and plenty of food is stored, which shows the lives of the Daping people have really improved," he said.
There are fears that the widening gap between rich and poor could lead to social instability and threaten the rule of the Communist Party. In Gansu, the annual income of each farmer was estimated at €200 last year, well below the national rural average of €360.
In true Communist fashion, President Hu urged all Chinese people "to elevate the spirit of Red Army veterans in the country's great cause of a new Long March - the building of a well-off society and socialist modernisation," Xinhua news agency reported.