Spring Festival eve holiday not needed

Should the eve of the Lunar New Year be declared a public holiday? “Holiday for Spring Festival’s eve” has become a popular call on several forums and social media platforms, with supporters emphasizing the importance of the annual family reunion dinner.

The family reunion dinner on Lunar New Year’s eve has always been important for Chinese people. From 2008 to 2013, the eve of Lunar New Year was part of the Spring Festival public holiday. But a new regulation this year excluded it from the list of public holidays and added the Lunar Jan 3 into the Spring Festival holiday.

An increasing number of people — an estimated 300 million — compelled to work away from their villages and towns owing to the rapid pace of urbanization need hours or even a couple of days to reach home for the most important Chinese festival.

However, not all of the about 300 million migrant workers, need a holiday on Lunar New Year’s eve to enjoy the family reunion dinner. Official data show that about 269 million of them are farmers-turned-migrant workers engaged mostly in manual and semi-skilled labor, who can go home 10 to 20 days before Spring Festival. That the annual travel rush begins almost a month before Spring Festival shows that the majority of migrant workers return home days or even weeks in advance and thus it’s not a trouble for them to enjoy the Lunar New Year’s eve dinner with their families.

So the call for a public holiday on the eve of Lunar New Year comes mainly from people with higher educational qualifications in better-paying but tight-schedule jobs. In fact, this is the group that is the most active on the Internet in voicing its opinion. That means despite the high-pitched online call to declare Lunar New Year’s eve a public holiday, it is not necessarily the majority opinion of society.

From another point of view, however, the online plea for a holiday on Lunar New Year’s eve shows that people working far away from home need more holidays for family reunions, which calls for a change in the public holiday list.

The problem is that the lack of long holidays in China prevents migrant workers from visiting their families at regular intervals. But the solution to the problem is not whether Lunar New Year eve or Lunar Jan 3 should be added into the public holiday, but simply have an extra day off during Spring Festival. And if possible, the decision makers should increase the number of holidays in other months as well, so that workers can get more weeklong breaks for family reunions.

The author is vice-secretary general of the Beijing Tourism Academy. The article is an excerpt from his interview with China Daily’s writer Zhang Zhouxiang.