The live broadcast of The Paper Golden Week is in progress. Another golden week is coming, where are you?
Is it on the way to the scenic spot, or is it to continue the busy work before the holiday?
Up to now, Golden Week has been with us for 15 years.
On September 18th, 1999, the State Council issued "National Holidays and Remembrance Days", and decided to increase public holidays. The concept of Golden Week came into being.
In the past 15 years, Chinese has experienced the surge of tourists, the "faint sadness" when the May 1 Golden Week was cancelled, and the chaotic mode of "taking three days off, six days off in the sky, one day off in the sky, seven days off in the sky and one day off in the Mid-Autumn Festival".
In April, 2001, the blooming peony in Luoyang made viewers rush to take photos as a souvenir. CFP data map
The live broadcast of The Paper Golden Week is in progress. In fact, the discussion on the abolition of the Golden Week has always existed, and the pace of holiday reform has never stopped.
In 2013, the General Office of the State Council issued the Outline of National Tourism and Leisure (2013-2020), which stated that by 2020, the paid annual leave system for employees will be basically implemented.
In August this year, "Several Opinions of the State Council on Promoting the Reform and Development of Tourism" was issued, and then the paid vacation system was proposed.
In September this year, the inter-ministerial joint meeting on tourism in the State Council was established, and the inter-ministerial coordination meeting on national holiday tourism was cancelled. This also means that the National Holiday Office, which has been performing its duties for 14 years, will wave goodbye to the people and its functions will be replaced by the Joint Conference Office.
Cai Jiming, an honorary professor of Tsinghua University Institute of Social Sciences and head of the holiday reform research group in Tsinghua University, said in an interview with The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) that these signals sent a clear message: the holiday system in our country has been and is developing towards the full implementation of paid holidays. With the implementation of paid holidays, the Golden Week will also go down the historical stage.
The birth of golden week
In 1949, the "National Holidays and Remembrance Days" (hereinafter referred to as the "Measures") was revised three times.
The three amendments were made in 1999, 2007 and 2013, respectively, and the relevant the State Council Orders were signed and passed by then Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, Wen Jiabao and Li Keqiang of the State Council.
The emergence of the concept of Golden Week is related to the first revision of the Measures.
On September 18th, 1999, the State Council promulgated the National Holidays and Remembrance Days, and decided to increase public holidays. The Measures shall come into force as of the date of promulgation.
The Measures stipulate that holidays for all citizens include New Year, Spring Festival, Labor Day and National Day. Among them, except for the New Year holiday, which lasts for one day, all the other three festivals have three days off.
However, the 7-day "small holiday" needs to be pieced together with weekends.
The national holiday office plays a key role in it. In 2000, the national inter-ministerial coordination meeting on holiday tourism was established, and a holiday office was set up to arrange public holidays.
Before every holiday, the National Holiday Office will routinely issue a notice to inform the seven-day Golden Week holiday, and at the same time tell the holiday tourism coordination agencies of all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government to do a good job in the work of the current Golden Week of the year.
In this way, the Spring Festival, May 1st and 11th statutory holidays of three days, plus the two weekends before and after the adjustment, have formed a "small holiday" of seven days in a row three times a year.
According to the report of China Business News in 2000, there were seven days off on May Day that year, and more than 40 million people went out to travel, and the tourism income exceeded 18.1 billion yuan.
According to the report, because this phenomenon of concentrated tourism consumption is unprecedented and it is a seven-day long holiday, many business people are full of infinite reverie about it, and the seven-day long holiday has also begun to be called the Golden Week.
Reflection behind prosperity
The Golden Week gave birth to the holiday economy: there was a "blowout" of tourists in the scenic spot, and businesses earned "a lot of money". However, behind the prosperity, the voice of reflection is endless.
In 2003, Economic Daily published an article, proposing that "the institutional arrangement of Golden Week is obviously planned, which is not conducive to the long-term development of tourism".
According to the article, the Golden Week is only to release the demand in a centralized way, and it cannot create demand by itself. The root cause of insufficient domestic demand lies in the low income level of people, especially the low income level of low-income people and farmers in cities.
As a result, "the business has obviously shrunk in sales for a period of time after the Golden Week".
The article also puts forward some thorny problems such as "most scenic spots are overcrowded, food, clothing, housing and transportation are much more expensive than usual, services are generally discounted, and there are problems in the protection of scenic spots".
The article also points out that the introduction of a system must have its specific background conditions. This particular background condition will change with the passage of time, so the system must also change-either amending the old system or introducing a new system.
"The same is true of this specific system of Golden Week." The article said.
There are also many versions of the replacement plan for the Golden Week. On February 27th, 2004, Ji Baocheng, then president of China Renmin University, suggested adding traditional festivals as legal holidays, canceling the Golden Week and strengthening the Spring Festival holiday.
The other is to cancel the weekend and piece together a "small holiday" every month to divert the passenger flow during the Golden Week.
According to the Beijing News in 2005, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the report "2005: Macroeconomic Trends under the Double Steady Policy", in which it was suggested to reform the "weekend", changing two days off every week to one day off, and moving the rest day to the end of the month together, which would be enough to implement a small golden week of four or five days every month to replace the May Day and the Eleventh Golden Week.
Wang Xiaoguang, then director of the Economic Operation and Development Research Office of the Macroeconomic Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that the proposal to cancel the weekend was because "the Golden Week led to the irrationality of resource allocation".
According to the report, due to the extremely unbalanced leisure time, many unreasonable phenomena have been caused, and the off-peak season of tourism and leisure has been artificially unbalanced, resulting in a huge waste of tourism resources.
In addition, during the Golden Week, roads, railways, air traffic, hotels, shops and service industries all bear huge loads.
At the beginning of 2005, the relevant person in charge of the National Tourism Administration made it clear that they did discuss the adjustment of long vacation arrangements, but finally decided to continue to implement the Golden Week holiday system and it was impossible to cancel the Golden Week holiday.
However, the "resolute" attitude of the National Tourism Administration did not last long.
the abolition of the five one golden week
In June 2005, the relevant departments of the central government issued a document detailing the importance of adding New Year’s Eve, Lantern Festival, Qingming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival.
This seems to indicate that the plan of replacing the Golden Week with traditional festivals is gradually gaining an advantage.
According to the legal network, a new round of discussion upsurge appeared on January 22, 2007. On that day, the National Development and Reform Commission went to Renmin University of China to listen to the opinions of increasing the traditional festivals in China as legal holidays.
In February of the same year, Xinhua News Agency published a long and in-depth analysis of the policy background of the Golden Week adjustment. Ten local media, including Guangzhou Information Times, Shanghai Morning News and Hangzhou Metropolitan Express, jointly called for the inclusion of New Year’s Eve as a legal holiday.
The following month, the Central Committee of China Association for the Promotion of Democracy suggested to the State Council that traditional festivals should be added to statutory holidays.
Then, a number of folk experts also jointly suggested that the government should legislate to better combine holidays with folk culture. Gao Bingzhong, vice president of China Folklore Society and professor of Peking University, thinks that the reform of holiday is a tribute to China culture.
On November 9, 2007, the plan of the National Legal Holiday Adjustment Research Group was published on People’s Daily Online, Xinhuanet, the website of the National Development and Reform Commission, Sina, Sohu and other websites to conduct public opinion surveys.
On December 14th of this year, Wen Jiabao, then Prime Minister of the State Council, signed the State Council Order No.513: the State Council’s Decision on Amending the National Holidays and Remembrance Days, which was adopted at the 198th executive meeting in the State Council on December 7th, 2007, is hereby promulgated and will come into force on January 1st, 2008.
In the next two days, major national media published the full text of the revision. The basic content was that New Year’s Day, Tomb-Sweeping Day, Labor Day, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival all had one day off except the Spring Festival and National Day.
In other words, it is to change the 7-day long holiday of the May Day Golden Week into a 3-day long holiday and add 3 traditional holidays as legal holidays. Almost at the same time, the State Council issued regulations on paid vacation.
The rise of paid vacation
On December 7, 2007, the executive meeting of the State Council adopted the Regulations on Paid Annual Leave for Employees, which came into effect on January 1, 2008.
The Regulations on Paid Annual Leave for Employees stipulates that, except for statutory holidays, "employees who have worked for more than one year and less than 10 years shall be given an annual leave of 5 days; If it has been 10 years but less than 20 years, the annual leave will be 10 days; If it has been 20 years, the annual leave will be 15 days. "
In September of the same year, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security promulgated the Measures for the Implementation of Paid Annual Leave for Enterprise Employees.
In fact, paid vacation, as a statutory system, was written into the Labor Law as early as 1994. The holiday regulations adjusted and promulgated in 2007 vaguely revealed the intention of changing the holiday arrangement from golden week holiday to paid holiday.
However, the implementation of paid vacation is still a difficult problem.
According to China News Weekly, some employees of enterprises can’t even get overtime pay for holidays, and some even haven’t signed labor contracts or participated in social insurance, not to mention paid annual leave.
According to a report by Zhongan Online in 2012, 67% of office workers have difficulty in enjoying paid vacation, and experts who support paid vacation also admit that only 40% to 50% of the paid vacation system has been implemented.
According to a ranking published by CNN on the length of paid holidays in various countries, Brazil and Lithuania ranked first with 41 days, while China ranked last with 21 days.
As a result, the "paid holiday" can’t replace the voice of the Golden Week.
After the 18th National Congress, the timetable and roadmap for the implementation of paid vacation were released.
In 2013, the General Office of the State Council issued the Outline of National Tourism and Leisure (2013-2020), which stated that by 2020, the paid annual leave system for employees will be basically implemented.
In March 2014, Li Keqiang, Premier of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China proposed in the government work report that "it is necessary to expand service consumption, support social forces to set up various service organizations, focus on the development of services such as pension, health, tourism and culture, and implement the paid vacation system."
In July of the same year, Li Keqiang mentioned "implementing the paid vacation system" at the the State Council executive meeting. In addition, Li Zhong, spokesman of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, made it clear in January this year that it would promote the implementation of the paid vacation system for employees.
On August 21st, the Chinese government website published "Several Opinions of the State Council on Promoting Tourism Reform and Development" (hereinafter referred to as "Opinions"), which clearly defined the tourism industry from the national level.
The "Opinions" clearly put forward that the implementation of the paid annual leave system should be included in the agenda of local governments, as an important part of labor inspection and the protection of employees’ rights and interests, and institutions should be promoted to accelerate the implementation of the paid annual leave system for employees.
The Opinions also encourage employees to flexibly arrange paid annual leave in combination with personal needs and actual work.
In addition, under the condition that the total teaching time remains unchanged, colleges and universities can adjust the winter and summer vacation time according to the actual situation, and primary and secondary schools can arrange spring break according to relevant regulations, creating conditions for employees to implement paid annual leave.
The "Opinions" clarify that the system of paid annual leave is the responsibility of Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and other departments, and put forward specific measures before the end of June 2015.
National Holiday Office waved goodbye.
Nearly a month after the publication of the Opinions, the National Holiday Office, which has been in operation for 14 years, waved goodbye to the people.
According to the news of the Chinese government website on September 15th, the State Council agreed to establish an inter-ministerial joint conference system for tourism work in the State Council led by the State Council.
At the same time, the relevant documents of the State Council decided to cancel the national inter-ministerial coordination meeting on holiday tourism and merge its functions into the inter-ministerial joint meeting on tourism in the State Council.
This means that the National Holiday Office, which has been with us for 14 years, no longer exists.
The newly established Inter-Ministerial Joint Conference Office of the State Council Tourism will undertake the daily work of the joint conference, and the main responsible comrades of the Tourism Bureau will also serve as the director of the office.
In an interview with The Paper, Cai Jiming said that the cancellation of the National Holiday Office also sent a clear message: the holiday system in our country has been and is developing towards the full implementation of paid holidays.
Cai Jiming said that in 2008, the regulations on paid vacation had just been promulgated, so only the May Day Golden Week was cancelled that year, which was a way of gradual reform. After the paid vacation is fully implemented, people’s travel needs for "small holidays" will be met, and the Golden Week will gradually fade out.
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