Chinese New Year: Year of the Pig celebrations kick off
Chinese communities around the world welcome the Year of the Pig beginning Tuesday, ushering in the Lunar New Year with family feasts and shopping sprees.
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In mainland China over the past week, hundreds of millions of people have been cramming into trains, buses, cars and planes to reach family and friends in the world's largest annual migration, emptying the country's megacities of much of the migrant workforce.
The New Year is the most important holiday of the Chinese calendar and it’s marked with a fortnight of festivities and the exchange of gifts and red envelopes stuffed with money.
Streets were uncharacteristically empty in Beijing on Monday, with many shops and restaurants closed until next week but a growing number of Chinese are also choosing to travel abroad during the holiday period.
An estimated seven million Chinese tourists will head overseas over the Spring Festival this year, according to the official news agency Xinhua, citing numbers from Chinese travel agency Ctrip.
Chinese communities living in cities around the world are also welcoming the year of the Pig, though in Malaysia, where 60 percent of the population is Muslim and a quarter ethnic Chinese, some shopping centres chose not to display pig decorations.
Next door in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country which also has a sizeable ethnic Chinese population, the Lunar New Year is a public holiday.
It is also the most important holiday in Vietnam, where it is celebrated as Tet.
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