With the ban on fireworks now lifted in almost all Chinese cities for the Spring Festival, Chinese people seem to have taken revenge by setting off an unprecedented amount of festive explosives.

Beijing police said 380,000 boxes of firecrackers had been sold through government-appointed venues this year, compared with 240,000 boxes last year.

"The city also saw a sharp influx of substandard firecrackers, despite supervision efforts," the police said, noting that the city had confiscated 560 million substandard firecrackers, more than four times that of last year, roughly valued at 10 million yuan.

One hundred and twenty-five people were wounded in Beijing on Saturday night, the eve of Chinese Lunar New Year, and three were seriously injured, including one person whose eyeballs had to be removed by doctors. A total of 114 fires were also reported, the police said.

It has been a tradition for centuries for Chinese to worship their deceased ancestors, Buddha and other gods on the first day of the Lunar New Year and pray for wealth and good health. With a revival of religious belief in recent decades, Buddhist and Taoist sites have become more crowded each year.

It is hardly surprising given the results of a recent national survey, which revealed that the actual number of religious believers in China may top 300 million, three times the official estimate.

Thirty-six-year-old office worker Liu Hao took his wife and parents to the Baiyunguan Taoist Temple in Beijing.

With so many people around, the family took almost three hours queuing up to offer incense sticks and pray to each god.

Chinese President Hu Jintao celebrated the New Year frying dough twists, eating steamed potatoes and cutting paper window decorations with poor farmers in the barren countryside of northwestern Gansu Province.

"Dear villagers, I come to greet you a happy new year," Hu said, addressing a crowd of farmers in front of a village house, which he visited eight years ago. "Today, I am very pleased to see lots of changes. New houses are erected and plenty of food is stored, which shows that your lives have really improved."

Just before the new year, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made a trip to low-income families in Fushun city, northeast China's Liaoning Province.

"The Chinese government must solve the problems for workers in the old industrial base. The first step is housing. The second is employment," Wen said. "Harmony will not be achieved until people live a stable life and enjoy their work."

If the top leadership's repeated visits to the poor on each Lunar New Year's eve in recent years had not succeeded in encouraging the average Chinese citizen to dig into their pockets and donate money to the needy, the popular New Year gala on CCTV on Saturday night spurred Liu Hao into philanthropy.

A group of children of migrant workers in Beijing recited a poem live on the show about their struggle for schooling in the capital city, prompting the female hostess of the show to start sobbing.

"I felt my eyes welling up, too," Liu said when he handed in a 100-yuan note at a donation point at a New Year's Day fair.

"I was born in the Year of the Pig so this year is my year. As a pig is supposed to stand for wealth and good fortune, I hope I can bring these things to people like the migrant school children, " he said.

Source: Xinhua