Study Of Changes Occurred In The Chinese Spring Festival In Indonesia

Chinese New year, commonly known as “Spring Festival”, is a Chinese, the most solemn and popular traditiona l festival in C hina, It has a very long history. Indonesia is a multi ethnic,multi lingual,multi religious country. C urrently, Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. Beside this, Indonesia also has biggest Chinese immigrants population. Every Year C hinese Indonesians also celebrate this traditional Spring Festival and hold a variety of activities and celebration.In this article there is a comparison between the local C hinese and Indonesian C hinese Spring festival. What rituals and customs a re still retained by the C hinese Indonesians? And what changes have arrived and influenced the festival? Does Indonesian Muslims traditional festival have affected C hinese New year festival or not? What is the real impact? The Indonesian government demands people should have religious beliefs. So whether this kind of religious beliefs have affected C hinese new year festival or not? All these questions are worth to know and do a research on it.This article is based on the case study done in Bangka Island Pa ngkalpinang city on various perspectives of C hinese New Year in Indonesia. The ethnography and qualitative research methods has been used in this research article. And also have taken a series of interviews. And a comparison has made of Indonesian C hinese New Year and C hinese New Year with similarities and differences. By interviewing Indonesian C hinese population we have found the different aspects of C hinese Spring festival and all the changes that have occurred in it.It was found in the Study research that Indonesian Bangka island Chinese Hakka have retained their tradition rituals, folk beliefs and traditional food of Chinese new year but at the same time, there are some of changes in ritual sacrifice items, foodstuff and rice wine, and Chun lian(spring festival couplets or new year scrolls), then causes factor of changes is in culture acculturation factor, intermarriage and turned to religion and political factors.