
State media hailed the mass travel over this month’s “Super Golden Week” holiday as a sign of profound economic vigor. Xinhua, for example, reported that the “travel boom […] demonstrated the country’s vibrant consumption and sustained economic momentum, highlighting the vitality of the Chinese economy.” Global Times celebrated “China’s Golden Week travel enthusiasm fueled by incredible infrastructure, services.” The number of trips over the holiday surged 16% from last year’s to a conveniently auspicious 888 million, and total spending similarly grew 15% to 809 billion yuan.
Much of the growth, though, could be attributed to the fact that the holiday was 14% longer—an eighth day resulting from the proximity of the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays. Reports from Caixin and Western outlets like Reuters and the Financial Times noted that spending per trip had actually fallen slightly, and referred to masked frugality, tepid consumption, and dashed hopes.
Elsewhere, though, even images of enormous traffic jams around highway toll booths fueled celebratory rhetoric. Some media outlets described the sight of thousands of red tail lights glowing in the dark as resembling “a galaxy of glittering stars.” On WeChat, prolific commentator Xiang Dongliang expressed bewilderment at this description, launching from there into an argument against the concentration of so much of the population’s domestic travel into a few nationally uniform peak periods, suggesting that this makes the holidays unnecessarily gruelling, inflexible, and even unsafe. He noted common arguments for the practice such as the benefits of predictable scheduling for public services and safety, financial markets, and schools, but suggested that these do not outweigh the negatives, and in any case do not require full nationwide synchronization. The post is peppered with photos of huge, densely packed crowds in various major tourist destinations. (Separately, a talk by Xiang on food safety at a Chengdu bookstore on October 9 was cancelled, reportedly on official orders.)
I truly don’t know what kind of sentiment would lead certain people to compare the sight of a massive nighttime traffic jam at some highway toll gates with a “galaxy of glittering stars.” As someone with relatively rich life experience, all the scene really stirs in me is a headache, backache, and the sensation of an uncomfortably full bladder.
It certainly doesn’t evoke even a flicker of pride.
As the holiday draws to a close, aside from wishing everyone safe travels, I hope that you never again have to wait for public holidays like Dragon Boat Festival and National Day to travel or visit relatives back home.
Screenshot of a photo post by “Anhui from Above”: “Wuzhuang Toll Station on the Shanghai-Xi’an Expressway welcomes the peak of return travel; hundreds of thousands of travellers converge in a glittering galaxy of stars on their way through Anhui to Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. We wish everyone a safe journey.”
I know that this sentiment is a bit “Let them eat cake” coming from a freelancer, but I do want to say that it would be entirely feasible for the country’s hundreds of millions of workers and students not to have their time off all at once.
[…] It’s true that other countries around the world have nationwide public holidays as well, and naturally there are various reasons for this, but that doesn’t mean China has to follow suit.
For one thing, given China’s vast territory and enormous population, combined with our traditional cultural emphasis on family reunions, the strain that public holidays place on public resources is particularly severe. This isn’t an issue for many countries, but here it urgently needs addressing.
For another thing, most other major countries have relatively generous time off in addition to public holidays. The flexibility to take vacation at other times satisfies a lot of the demand for travel and family visits, so there’s no need to squeeze the whole country’s tourism and family visits into a few public holidays.
In short, cutting back on synchronized national public holidays, increasing workers’ ability to make their own arrangements for time off, and guaranteeing workers’ rights to vacation time are all completely achievable, and we should do our utmost to achieve them.
Once more, with feeling: we know from experience that having the whole country travel en masse on public holidays like Dragon Boat Festival and National Day is a total mess …
Change is long overdue! [Chinese]
CDT Chinese editors collected some of the reader comments below Xiang’s WeChat article. Responses ranged from scornful and cynical to gloomy and resigned—a tone starkly at odds with the triumphalist mood in state media.
我吃猫糧:They keep coming up with tricks for painting suffering as a virtue.
泷居富春:Some people take pride in it, but it’s really a national tragedy, and the safety risks are huge.
如山妈妈淑苹君:Your proposal is excellent, Master Xiang, we really should stagger the peak vacation and travel periods. But given our current national condition and enforcement capacity, staggered vacation would end up meaning no vacation at all 😥 😥
小Lia的梦境:I have a feeling that these nationwide public holidays are the only ones that people—including business owners—see as legally mandated. If we started having businesses arranging vacation times independently, it would all get swallowed up for one reason or another 🤦 🤦 🤦
🙂:It’s really suffocating to describe those who have to live far from home and save money on highway tolls [which were waived for the holiday period] as a “galaxy of glittering stars.” I can’t imagine how cushy a life you’d have to lead to make that comparison.
Q: Don’t make things harder for managers, LOL
自来卷:They’re service providers, not managers, and it’s our duty to offer suggestions.
D: An eight-day holiday that includes two weekend days and two days you’ll have to work some other time is really only a four-day break. They’re just loosening the reins a bit on us livestock to stimulate spending.
李飘飘: +10000!! Take us teachers, for example. Everyone thinks we can just slack off for three months of summer and winter holidays, but the reality is that we hardly dare go out then. It’s either freezing cold or boiling hot, everywhere’s crowded, hotels and flights are wildly expensive, and we can’t afford them on our meager salaries 🤷 We just end up staying home …
说说号码:Let’s start with making forty-hour workweeks a reality—we can talk about the rest later.
WadeJ:Everything’s neatly laid out for you from birth to death, why do you need to worry about picking vacation days?
dancerinfire:A lot of prefecture-level cities can’t even guarantee two-day weekends. If we switched to flexible vacation days, we’d end up getting none at all.
赵冠楠:This is the same mindset as those “synchronized group calisthenics” radio broadcasts, writ large.
小肉肉:A “galaxy of glittering stars” … whoever said that is really asking for a couple of slaps across the face!! [Chinese]