The Spring Festival is the most important festival for the Chinese people and is when all family members get together, just like Christmas in the West. All people living away from home go back, becoming the busiest time for transportation systems of about half a month from the Spring Festival. Airports, railway stations and long-distance bus stations are crowded with home returnees.

The Spring Festival falls on the 1st day of the 1st lunar month, often one month later than the Gregorian calendar. It originated in the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600 BC-c. 1100 BC) from the people's sacrifice to gods and ancestors at the end of an old year and the beginning of a new one. The 2009 lunar year marks China's Year of the Ox.

As usual tradition the Western Returned Students Association organized a grand get-together party of entertainments to host the returned scholars who have been working hardly for the construction of motherland. The WRSA invited some kinds of performers, singers, Chinese traditional instrumental players and western instrumental players, dancers, talk show players for the Festival to amuse the audience and the WRSA members enjoyed the wonderful celebration of thousands of years of culture.

The item on the programme that impressed me was Ventriloquism - that is utterance which makes hearers think the sound comes from a source other than the actual speaker. So Ventriloquism is an act of deception in which a person manipulates his or her voice so that it appears that the voice is coming from someone or more often, something else. The most familiar type of ventriloquist today is a nightclub performer sitting on a stool with a wooden dummy or nap toy on his lap. This comedic style of ventriloquism, however, is a fairly recent innovation, less than 100 years old. They were once called, "Belly Talkers." The most Chinese people  are not familiar with this entertainment. When I was very young in the 1940s I saw an Hollywood movie starring Edgar Bergen. Bergen popularized the idea of the comedic ventriloquist,an Academy Award-winning actor, best known as a ventriloquist. Edgar Bergen acted together with his favorite figure, Charlie McCarthy.

At the WRSA party  the organizers invitated a CCTV actor to display th belly talking and  vaudeville acts. The actor not only concentrate on humor as much as on demonstrating the ventriloquist's ability to deceive the audience but also used his skill in switching voices. He perfectly displayed a wonderful section of Peking opera " Shajiabang" by using two more figures, one male and one female, switching quickly from one voice to another. See the photos of the belly talking and singing of multiple figures of different sex.

The audience also viewed different items of dancing, chorus singing.

belly talking

vaudeville acts

famous clarinetist Fan Shengqi