Doing Business in China: Beijing Fashions Confusing Holiday System With Chinese Characteristics

It’s summertime, and the living is certainly easier these days for the millions of Chinese and expats here who are taking their summer breaks with both personal leave and the smattering of public holidays around this time. But it wasn’t always this way, despite Mao Zedong’s attempts to forge a worker’s paradise in the first three decades of Communist Party rule. Apparently holidays weren’t part of the paradise package in those earlier times.

But joking aside, the public holiday calendar and notions of personal leave really are very 21st Century phenomena in China, and also the source of nightmares for managers and human resources personnel trying to plan their staffing arrangements. That’s in no small part due to the quirky nature of China’s public holiday schedule, which combines Western calendar — and Lunar Year-based holidays with a somewhat enigmatic system of creating three-day holidays around those festival dates.

We’ll return to that holiday schedule shortly and how it works, which has taken me years to finally understand. But first let’s kick off with a big-picture look at how holidays are viewed in China, and how the nation’s system for annual vacation days stacks up against the rest of the world.

Many might be surprised to learn that China’s public holidays are actually more numerous than the United States or Britain. Those of us who toil in the Middle Kingdom are entitled to 11 public holidays off each year, versus 10 for the U.S. and a miserly eight for Britain. By comparison, the most generous countries are India and Colombia, with 18 days each. Mexico is the stingiest at just seven days, according to consulting firm Mercer.

But it wasn’t always like that here in China.

The country I encountered on my first arrival in 1987 was not a friendly place for vacationers, which perhaps explains why there weren’t many public holidays. Personal leave was an alien concept back then, though people often showed up late to work or occasionally didn’t come at all without explanation. Back then people seldom went on vacation, and most sightseeing was conveniently combined into working trips for people who were high ranking enough to travel as part of their jobs.

Reconstructing the past

It took a bit of polling among some of my older friends, assisted by some online searching, to finally recreate the vacation calendar back then. Everyone remembered that Jan. 1, Chinese New Year and the Oct. 1 National Day were all official holidays then. But memories varied a bit after that over a few other minor holidays, showing just how remote in the past that time has become for many. In the end, we determined that the May 1 Labor Day was also a holiday. After that, there were also a group of “serious” days when people could reflect, meet or hold other activities, though no time off was given. That group included Children’s Day on June 1, and the just-past date of Aug. 1 to mark the founding of the People’s Liberation Army.

Given the scarcity of public holidays, absence of annual leave and the fact that weekends were only a single day, you can see why people didn’t have much time for vacations.

Fast forward to the present, when weekends have morphed into a Western-style regular two-day break, and China’s labor law grants annual leave based on seniority at a company. The formula is pretty straightforward, giving five days of annual leave for the first 10 years at a company, 10 days for the next 10, and then topping out at 15 for anyone around for more than 20 years. Of course like everything else in China, laws are often more perfect in theory than in practice, and it’s quite common to hear about employees who get little or none of their entitled annual leave and no required compensation.

Such compensation is also quite straightforward under the labor law rolled out in the mid-1990s, which awards time-and-a-half pay for overtime on normal workdays, double pay on weekends and triple pay for national holidays.

But the real fun begins when it comes to public holidays. The original four of those are still on today’s calendar, and have been joined by the more traditional Qing Ming Festival honoring ancestors in April, the Dragon Boat Festival for arrival of summer and Mid-Autumn Festival for arrival of fall. The Lunar New Year and National Day are both five-day affairs, and everything else is just a single day.

But someone at the ministry that determines such things decided at some point that the single-day holidays should become three-day breaks, in a sort of attempt to imitate the long-weekend concept in the West. The problems began when that same person realized you can’t really move such sacred cows, which occur on different days each year, to conveniently fall on Monday or Friday to create a conventional three-day weekend. The result is a bit of a nightmare, which often has people taking three-day public holidays in the middle of the week, and then forced to work normal weekend days to make up for extra days off during the week.

There does seem to be a convoluted logic behind the way this calendar is devised, though explaining it would probably take an entire column or two. Rather than do that, I would advise people to look at the annual calendar that’s published every Dec. 1 on the www.gov.cn website, which lays out the holiday schedule for the year ahead. It’s all in Chinese, but even those who can read it will still probably find their heads spinning as they try to work through the complex series of days off and make-up work days that constitute this uniquely Chinese 21st century holiday calendar.

Doug Young has lived in Greater China for two decades, including a 10-year stint at Reuters, where he led China corporate news coverage. Send your questions or comments to DougYoung@caixin.com.