October 1, China’s Week-long National Holiday

October 8, 2007 by admin.

Today is Monday, October 8 and I assume that it’s back to work for everyone here in Beijing after the week-long holiday for the equivalent of China’s Independence Day, which is the date that the People’s Republic of China was formally established by Chairman Mao at Tian’anmen Square on October 1, 1949. China actually has three yearly week-long holidays, known as “Golden Weeks”, one for National Day, one on May 1 for Labor Day, and the other for the Chinese New Year (also known as “Spring Festival”), which falls on a different day each year in either January or February by the Western calendar because it is based on the Lunar Calendar. There is some debate within the Chinese government as to whether the 7-day holidays should continue for Labor Day and May Day, with interruption of the normal flow of business cited as the reason to discontinue them. Critics of these holidays say that they should only be 3-days long, with the other days spread to other traditional Chinese holidays such as the Mid-Autumn Festival. From my personal standpoint, when I first came to China teaching in an MBA program, the week-long holidays (which had just been started in 1999, the year before I came to China) came as a pleasant surprise and gave me a chance to do some traveling around the country. These holidays and my subsequent travels in China were so much fun that I decided to start Beijing Discovery Tours to help other people enjoy traveling inside of China as much as I have. (To plan your own Beijing tours and holidays or other China tours,  visit our website at www.beijingdiscoverytours.com.)
The main point of this writing today (other than to plug our website of course) was to suggest that we might be able to learn something from the Chinese government in the U.S.A. It’s not often that you read something positive about China’s government, but in this case I think that they have done something right. The whole idea behind the “Golden Week” holidays was to spur domestic consumption, and judging by the amount of travel and shopping that is done during these holidays, it has been an overwhelming success. I know that this could never happen back home, but what if we put a couple of mandatory week-long holidays into the U.S.A.’s too-busy calendar? A week-long celebration for Independence Day would give more people a chance to travel and see their families (as well as promote a greater sense of unity in the country)  as would a week-long holiday for Christmas/Hanukkah, and they are fairly equally spread out through the year. It might do us good as Americans to take a more relaxed approach to work rather than constantly enduring the stress-filled lives that far too many of us seem to live.

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