When is a holiday not a holiday?
In which I think about make-up days and the recent Labour Day break
Today is Saturday. It’s also Thursday. The week before last, Sunday was a Wednesday. This is not Groundhog Day or some Hermione Granger-style time-turning arrangement, but adjustments to the official work week before and after the five-day May break. Welcome to public holidays, China style.
China has two types of public holiday or festival. There are the ancient holidays, like Spring Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival and Tombsweeping, and there are the post-1949 holidays. The latter have a distinctly red flavour, and of these the two biggest are National Day on October 1st (the day Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic at Tian’anmen) and May 1st: Labour Day.
The first day of May — Labour Day or International Workers’ Day in some countries — has long been a favourite socialist holiday (though of course the original May Day long predates Marx and Engels). Officially, China has three days’ public holiday to celebrate wǔ yī láodòngjíe (五一劳动节, literally “5/1 Labour Festival”). Everyone gets May 1st to 3rd off. Combined with the weekend before or after, that usually means five days off in a row. Sounds great!
But for both types of holiday, although you might get three or five or seven consecutive days off, not all of these days are “real” holiday. Often, there will be one or two days that are balanced out by working at the weekend before or after the holiday itself. (If you like physics metaphors, it’s a bit like virtual particles popping out of the vacuum then annihilating each other a short time later). This rescheduling of the work week is called tiáo xiū (调休, literally “adjust rest”). It’s a policy that was introduced in 1999 to try and stimulate the economy by getting people to travel more and spend more during these longer public holidays. My friends and I usually call the weekend work days “make-up days”.
Most people I know dislike tiáo xiū, though they appreciate the holiday itself. In a university context, a six-day week means students and teachers are all exhausted, and it messes up curricula because suddenly one class is out of sync with another, or you’re expected to be teaching the same class two days in a row, so they haven’t had time to absorb the material or do the practice and preparation they need. Thankfully, our department has enough autonomy to discreetly switch at least some of the make-up day classes to “asynchronous learning”. We assign students tasks to work on in their own time, with videos to upload or writing to submit to show that they’ve completed the tasks.
That’s why, when I should be just coming out of my Thursday afternoon class with the engineering sophomores, I’m sitting in my living room, listening to the rain pouring down outside and spattering the balcony with tiny flecks of mud from my plant pots. The students in the Thursday classes are working on their final projects, and most of the last class with them, just two days ago, was kind of boring for me because they were just working in groups preparing their content. So we assigned them a practice task that they can do either during class time, or at their convenience any time before the next class.
They’ll present their projects next week, on topics related to “thriving in America” during their semester or year abroad. I’m looking forward to seeing what they put together. I’ve got one group investigating “how to prepare well and avoid injury & extra cost at the shooting range” (a lot of the boys especially are eager to try out real firearms), several groups looking at various aspects of travel in the US during spring or winter break, a group looking at internships, one group thinking about “strategies to deal with robbery, fraud and theft” (they’re terrified of being mugged) and one group exploring “the meaning of life for young Americans” through the medium of a Monopoly-style board game. They were all relieved to hear that we were not asking them to come to the classroom this make-up day.
Having these slightly longer “Golden Week” public holidays in May and October, when most people have relatively little annual leave or paid time off, has another unfortunate side-effect: everyone is travelling all at the same time. Train tickets to almost anywhere for the days at the start and end of the holidays sell out fast. Crowding at major tourist sites is notorious. One of the first four-character idioms that I learned in Chinese is rén shān rén hǎi (人山人海, literally “people mountain, people sea”), a sea of people; this article from Sixth Tone has some great photos of rén shān rén hǎi from this year’s May holiday. I’ve learned from experience that I don’t enjoy the huge crowds, and generally choose to stay home or go to lesser-visited places at these times.
So, this year, I spent a good chunk of the holiday catching up on writing feedback for my students’ research article assignments. I was pleased that relatively few of their papers showed signs of AI-based cheating, although there were one or two egregious transgressors, including the students who “wrote” this gem:
“By juxtaposing data collected from students at [College X] and [College Y], our objective was to uncover discernible patterns and extract meaningful insights regarding the nexus between screen time and sleep quality within these academic contexts.”
Hopefully they extract some meaningful insights from the nexus of my pointed comments, and manage to produce something they actually understand and is actually meaningful for their final submission.
I did take a break from assignment feedback to visit some friends in the bigger city nearby. As we walked around the university campus where one friend is based, enjoying the bright warm weather, I noticed that not everyone was on holiday. Labourers at a construction site were still labouring, Labour Day or not.
That made me a little sad. I appreciate the way that the Chinese government highlights the value and importance of farmers, construction workers, miners and others involved in more manual work. It just doesn’t feel like the promotional images of happy welders and factory workers match up to the reality of who gets to enjoy the holiday and who has the financial resources to go on a jaunt to the seaside or the mountains. And while I enjoy long winter and summer breaks and two days off most weekends, many workers regularly have six-day work weeks and very little vacation time of any sort.
This is probably the last time I’ll have to deal with make-up days before I return to Scotland in the summer. These “last time” experiences are beginning to build up, and I’ll probably write a post about them soon. Meantime, I hope you enjoyed your May holiday, if there was one where you are!
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