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Ahhh!!!!! There goes my 1 week break!!!

China approves plan to shorten May Golden Week break
It goes ahead with holiday revamp despite fears of drop in tourism revenue
By Clarissa Oon, CHINA CORRESPONDENT

CHAOTIC: Travellers at a railway station in Tianjin during a Golden Week holiday this year. Beijing’s move will help ease the strain on the transport industry during the May travel period. — PHOTO: REUTERS

BEIJING - CHINA has approved a controversial plan to shorten one of the country’s three ‘Golden Week’ national holidays.

And for the first time, it will grant public-sector employees paid annual leave, state media announced last night.

The sudden revamp of the country’s annual holiday system will reduce the number of official days off during the week-long May Day holiday from three to just one.

More importantly, it could cause significant revenue loss for China’s domestic travel and hotel industry in the short term.

In the long run, however, the strain on national transportation and tourism resources during the peak Golden Week travel periods would be eased and ordinary Chinese would be encouraged to travel more frequently at other times of the year, argue defenders of Beijing’s plan.

To compensate for the loss of one Golden Week, three traditional Chinese festivals will be declared public holidays.

Holidays for the Tomb Sweeping Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival will increase the total number of public holidays in China from 10 to 11.

The proposals to scrap one Golden Week and introduce the leave system were approved by a State Council meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday.

The new holiday calendar is set to take effect after being approved by China’s annual National People’s Congress, or Parliament, next March.

Singapore and other short-haul overseas destinations favoured by the Chinese may actually gain from this holiday shake-up, travel industry insiders told The Straits Times.

‘We view it positively. Where there were just three peak travel periods previously, this change provides more windows of travel to Singapore,’ said Mr Edmund Chua, the Singapore Tourism Board’s chief representative in Greater China.

China’s three Golden Week breaks fall on Chinese New Year, May Day and the Oct 1 National Day.

Most mainland workers currently do not enjoy paid leave and rely on the Golden Weeks to give them the opportunities to travel around the country and overseas, or simply to take a break from work.

Under the new regulations, employees in the public sector may be granted between five and 15 days of paid leave a year, depending on the number of years they have worked.

First introduced in 1999 to stimulate domestic travel and consumption, the Golden Weeks have become increasingly chaotic as millions of holidaymakers pile into planes, trains, cars and buses and descend on tourist sites during those times.

While some argue that an overhaul of China’s annual holiday system is long overdue, the proposal to scrap the May 1 Golden Week holiday ran into surprisingly stiff opposition when it was first mooted last month.

A group of more than 20 newspapers even took the rare move of announcing a joint motion to oppose the plan.

Travel agencies, hotels and restaurants feared a sudden drop in revenue, while some Chinese expressed scepticism that their employers would honour the government’s plan to introduce the paid leave system.

Officially, the Golden Week breaks are only three days long.

However, as Chinese are required to work the weekend before the holiday, it is normal practice to then take those two days off the following week, making each break last for seven consecutive days.