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The golden weeks, implemented in 2000, are seven-day periods arranged around a three-day holiday by adjusting weekend work schedules. Their original purpose was to encourage domestic travel and tourism -- a policy so successful that tourist spots and transport systems have been overwhelmed each year during these three weeks.
The Lunar New Year, which falls in January or February, and National Day on Oct. 1 will remain three-day holidays. Three traditional festivals, long absent in mainland China, will become public holidays -- Tomb-sweeping Day, the Dragon Boat Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival. Labor Day and New Year's Day will bring the number of national holidays to 11.
There are still many individuals and organizations that disapprove of cancelling one golden week. Travel agencies and entertainment spots fear that visitor numbers may fall, along with their revenues. The long holidays have brought tremendous profits to the government, which owns most of the tourist spots. It is debatable whether the complications caused by floods of people moving around the country outweigh the benefits.
Some officials value the long holidays because they effectively prevent large gatherings of people for possible protests or demonstrations. They tend to scatter the people around the country and focus their attention on entertainment.
Presumably, the Chinese government carefully considered all these factors before deciding to end one and keep two of the long holidays. They also surely considered the implications of bringing back the three long-banished traditional holidays.
For more than 20 years, China's economy has enjoyed a high speed of development, largely because the government focused on economic growth. The figures are impressive, as are the developed coastal cities and the numbers of newly rich people. Analysts say China has the world's second largest economy after the United States.
However the prosperity of the Chinese government has also had negative consequences, including the disparity between the developed eastern part of the country and underdeveloped west, the gap between the living standards of rich individuals and the poor ordinary people and the devastation of the environment.
The economy-oriented policy has also brought other problems including corruption and abuses of individual rights. The drive to get rich has destroyed the basic morality and social norms regulating governance and social justice. In the search for remedies to these serious problems, the government is looking to traditional Chinese culture.
Economic prosperity is not real modernization if morality, social norms, justice and individual rights are abandoned or trampled upon in the process of attaining it. The Party and the nation may be at risk of collapsing, which is too big a price for the Chinese government to pay.
So the return of the traditional festivals might be a tactic aimed at encouraging the Chinese people to revitalize their traditional culture, with its strong moral and social norms. A real stakeholder should keep a good balance between hard power and soft power in the course of development. Perhaps China's leaders have realized the value of traditional culture both in addressing the domestic situation and in relating to the rest of the world.
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(Zhang Quanyi is an associate professor at the Zhejiang Wanli University in Ningbo, China, and a Ph.D. candidate at Shanghai International Studies University, studying policy making and collective identity. His research interests focus on conflict management and identity construction. He can be contacted at qyzhangupi@gmail.com. ©Copyright Zhang Quanyi.)
