America’s Thanksgiving Holiday … in China?

Udumbara Udumbara
Nov 27, 2025 - 11:00 Updated: Nov 27, 2025 - 00:06
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America’s Thanksgiving Holiday … in China?

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Commentary
As tension remains high between the United States and China, censorship by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) grows stronger. That said, a number of reports in recent years about Chinese returnees celebrating Thanksgiving can still be found on the internet.

For example, in November 2020, a dormitory supervisor at Harbin Institute of Technology distributed candies to students with a cheerful “Happy Thanksgiving” message. One student took offense, interpreting it as the promotion of Western religious holidays, and reported the supervisor. The university quickly apologized and reaffirmed that campuses must resist foreign cultural infiltration.

Since then, similar incidents have occurred at other institutions when student groups tried to organize Thanksgiving events.

Thanksgiving Is Catching On–At Least a Little Bit

It’s not just expatriate Americans hosting homesick colleagues for Turkey Day. Chinese citizens who have studied or worked in the United States and have now returned home are also celebrating Thanksgiving in cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. The number of American-style Thanksgiving celebrations by these returning citizens—known as “haigui” or “sea turtles"—is growing.

And why wouldn’t it be?

Between 1978 and 2024, more than 6.56 million Chinese students went abroad for higher education, and 79.3 percent—over 5.2 million—have come home. In the 2023–2024 academic year alone, 266,000 students were enrolled in American universities and colleges. These returnees form a highly educated, cosmopolitan cohort that now occupies key positions in technology, finance, education, and media in China. Many of them first encountered Thanksgiving during their years in the United States.

For Chinese returnees who have returned home from the United States, what may have begun as an invitation to a work colleague’s holiday gathering, a professor’s house, or a dormitory potluck to celebrate Thanksgiving may become an annual tradition back home.

Chinese millennials in first-tier cities often observe at least one Western holiday, with Thanksgiving ranking high on the list because it carries no gift-giving pressure and aligns neatly with existing values of family reunion and gratitude. Others, often Protestant Christian Chinese, celebrate the holiday in a Chinese fashion.
In 2018, the South China Morning Post wrote about the growing popularity of celebrating the American holiday in China. Every November (in the years leading up to 2018), in China’s major cities, a growing number of families and friends gather for a very un-Chinese practice that may or may not involve a table spread with roast turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce, or simply Chinese dishes to mark the celebration.

Why Turkey Day Is Politically Dangerous

Yet, to the CCP, Thanksgiving—like Christmas—is not merely a harmless cultural import. Its historical and religious roots make it politically dangerous. The American holiday traces its origins to the 1621 harvest celebration of the Plymouth Pilgrims, English Protestants who thanked God for their survival after a brutal first year in the New World. Successive presidential proclamations explicitly framed the day as one of gratitude to “Almighty God” or “Divine Providence.”
Such clear references to a Creator God pose a direct threat to the CCP and its primacy in society as the sole authority on life, economics, family, fortune, and truth in the People’s Republic of China. Just as it banned Christmas, the last thing the CCP wants to see spread among its 1.4 billion citizens is a “foreign” holiday from the cultural trappings of its global adversary.

A Threat to the CCP?

But despite persistent and sometimes violent efforts, it should be well-understood by the CCP that stamping out an idea or a group deemed a threat to its rule—even as common as Christianity or harmless as Falun Gong—is difficult at best. But trying to eliminate an eternal force with temporal means is a futile exercise reserved for the foolish, the arrogant, and the deluded.

Even today’s secular version of Thanksgiving retains an essential tone of reflection, a deep thread of community, and an internal and external acknowledgment of blessings that do not align with the state’s claims. For the officially atheist regime of China, this creates the kind of tension that’s born of rank inferiority and perhaps even a bit of desperation.

That’s why registered Protestant churches (under the state-supervised Three-Self Patriotic Movement) sometimes hold Thanksgiving services that blend biblical themes with traditional Chinese harvest gratitude, while avoiding any suggestion that divine grace supersedes the CCP.

A Challenge to the CCP as the Single Source of Truth

How sensitive is the CCP to the American Thanksgiving celebration and the ideas it promotes?

Quite sensitive, actually.

Official rhetoric insists that China’s prosperity is entirely the result of Party leadership and control, as exemplified by the “China model.” Personal gratitude expressed outside of that context—whether to family, friends, luck, or a higher power—implicitly undermines the narrative that all good things flow from the state.
Not coincidentally, Thanksgiving also threatens the idea of, and the need for, an all-powerful political party.

The Cost of Seeking Global Influence

There is a deep irony at play here.

On the one hand, Beijing actively encourages its brightest citizens to study abroad, understanding that overseas experience is a great source of technical and managerial talent. Concurrently, it invests heavily in global influence through Confucius Institutes (now rebranded), media acquisitions, and cultural diplomacy to shape the world’s perception of China.

On the other hand, the more China engages the United States, the more of its citizens spend their formative years immersed in American habits, values, and holidays. When those citizens return—often with American spouses, bilingual children, and a taste for pumpkin pie—American ideas come with them and take root in Chinese soil.

Although it’s unlikely that Thanksgiving will ever replace Lunar New Year in China, as long as hundreds of thousands of talented Chinese continue to cycle through American universities and workplaces, the holiday will keep arriving in suitcases alongside iPhones and graduate diplomas.

In the quiet act of carving a turkey and saying grace, returnees are demonstrating an ironic truth and threat that the CCP would rather not acknowledge: The more Beijing reaches out to the world, the more difficult it becomes to control the ideas that flow back in, especially when people wish to express their gratitude for all the goodness and abundance in their lives.

Here’s wishing you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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