China’s ‘golden week’ holidays come at a cost
For iPhone users in China, the calendar has long presented a small but recurring problem. On a Sunday designated as a make-up workday, an alarm might remain silent. On a regular Friday converted into a day off, it might ring anyway. Nearly 17 years after entering the Chinese market, Apple quietly updated its operating system in September to automatically recognise China’s official schedule of…
China's "golden week" holidays present a conundrum for its citizens, as the country's holiday calendar is not a static record of dates but a dynamic mechanism for redistributing public time. By moving weekend leave to around national holidays, policymakers engineer longer continuous breaks at the expense of a predictable working week.
This practice, conceived in the wake of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, was designed to jump-start domestic spending through multi-day "golden weeks". However, the system relies on borrowing time from the working week, forcing employees to endure gruelling six-day working weeks. While preserving traditional observances such as the Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival, the official calendar creates extended breaks without expanding overall statutory leave.
This disruption of the basic cadence of private enterprise and daily life highlights the tension between macroeconomic management and the need for predictability in daily life.
Brief written by urgent.news from Reuters Business via SCMP's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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