Festivals could be real, the fake part is the amount of people joining and celebrating because they are forced to and not because they want to.

As in, Chinese government is running the country like a business and they are trying to make so much money that they will rule over the whole earth that, eventually they forget about making their people happy and gathering thousands upon thousands of people in places and paying them or even just forcing them to have fun is not really constitutes as a festival, surely there must be some people who had fun and celebrated because they wanted to as well but we all know how China literally tries to save face against rest of the world by constantly trying to show how "awesome" they are etc, which shows in this festival as well.