Traditional beliefs preclude having your hair cut or cleaning your floors until the end of Spring Festival, as the New Year celebrations are known.

Despite the ruling Communist Party trying to sweep away such beliefs over the past 60 years, especially during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, many people still observe them.

In this Year of the Tiger, fewer couples than normal are expected to marry, with many having rushed to wed before the end of the last Year of the Ox to avoid the curse of the new “springless” year.

The Chinese Lunar New Year usually starts in late January, and Chinese astrology holds that a much later new year, such as this one, lacks the male “yang” energy of spring. No yang means no husband, making 2010 a “widow year” in Chinese folklore.

“There are superstitions, which are still popular in rural areas,” He Xingliang, an ethnologist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said. “People think the tiger is fierce, and that people born in a Tiger year will harm family members,” he said.

“If you ride a tiger, it is hard to get off,” according to another Chinese proverb.

Couples who risk tying the knot this year can expect to suffer rocky relationships for many years, with the possibility of “harm to husbands, disrupted marriages and unlucky children,” the China Daily newspaper said.

The tiger is the third of the 12 Chinese animal zodiac signs.

The animal signs are linked each year to the ancient binary opposition of yin and yang and to one of the five elements of metal, fire, wood, earth and water. Each individual combination recurs every 60 years.

The metal-tiger year is the 27th of each 60-year cycle, and the metal element makes it a “golden” year that is good for business.

“I feel the Tiger year will be better than the Ox year, since there was a financial crisis last year,” he said.

In astrological lore, people born in a Tiger year are regarded as courageous idealists but can be sometimes aggressive or over-sensitive.

The tigers’ biggest conflicts are with monkeys, while their best matches are people born in a horse or dog year.

Famous people born in tiger years include Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who turns 84 this year, Ludwig van Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, Stevie Wonder and Hollywood celebrities William Hurt, Demi Moore, Jodie Foster and Tom Cruise.

The Beijing city government recorded one of the lowest birthrates in recent years in 1998, the last Tiger year, the newspaper said.

Yet amid the traditional family feasts, fireworks, temple fairs and shopping over the week-long new year holiday, modern technology now also plays an important part.

New-year text messaging has become so popular that the three main mobile telephone service expect to exceed the 18 billion texts sent over last year’s holiday by China’s 700 million subscribers.

Transportation services will also be overloaded, with officials forecasting some 2.5 billion journeys by road, rail, air and ship in the 40-day peak period including the holiday week, up 8 percent from last year.

Many of the travelers are migrant workers who return home to spend the holiday with their families, while New Year vacations are growing in popularity for affluent urban families.