Sending greetings via a courtesy call during the Chinese New Year (or Spring Festival) is traditional etiquette in China. However, as with all facets of life, technology is changing the way we do things. What began as a personal visit to one's friends and family many years ago is now compressed into text messages and microblog greetings on special occasions.

Luc Bendza, a Gabonese who lives in Beijing, prefers to send text message greetings during the holiday. "Making Chinese New Year courtesy calls is a tradition in China. It is [however, more] convenient to express such courtesy by sending text messages. I really enjoy it," he told ChinAfrica. Like Bendza, many other foreigners living in Beijing are also changing the way that they greet their friends and loved ones over the holidays.  

Big change

Changes in the way of making New Year courtesy calls reflect changes in the means of communication over the years.

During years when the telephone was not available to all, most people made such calls by paying a personal visit.

In the early 1990s, sending postcards came into fashion. Up to 2.5 million greeting cards were sent across the country by post offices during the Spring Festival season in 1992. However, with the wide use of mobile phones and the Internet, the sales of New Year greeting cards decreased year by year. In 1999, sending paper greeting cards became outdated, as it was both inconvenient and environment-unfriendly. Paper cards were replaced by e-cards.

Back in September 1983, when the first paging center opened in Shanghai, the beeper became a part of life. During the Spring Festival in 1992, Chinese began to convey greetings through beeper messages. The 126-paging center in Beijing dealt with up to 10,000 Spring Festival pagings per hour during the years of beeper popularity.

At that time, when the landline telephone was not accessible to all families, people standing in a queue waiting to reply to page messages became a common sight.

In 1995, 20 percent of Beijing residents made long-distance phone call greetings during the Spring Festival. In 1983, however, nearly half of the long-distance calls in Beijing had to be transferred by operators. Sometimes, it took up to 30 minutes to make a long-distance call. Ten years later, Beijingers could make direct dialed long-distance calls to 2,000 cities and counties across the nation, and to about 230 countries and regions in the world. The development of the telephone service set the trend for phoning others at Spring Festival.

In 1987, the first mobile phone was introduced to China, but it took 13 years before these phones were in common use. In 2005, the number of mobile phone subscribers amounted to 340 million. Since then, making New Year greetings by sending text messages has become a common practice.

During this year's weeklong Spring Festival, the number of text messages sent by China Mobile subscribers in Beijing alone exceeded 1.6 billion, an increase of 8 percent year on year and a daily amount of 230 million messages.