Chinese Holidays Explained: Spring Festival, Golden Week & the Adjusted Schedule System

In late January, you’ll notice something changing on the Beijing subway. There are more suitcases. People’s faces carry a blend of anxiety and anticipation. Phone screens glow with the 12306 ticket-booking app. There’s a faint feeling of departure in the air — not sadness, but the relief of “finally going home.”

Chunyun has begun.

Spring Festival: Where It All Starts

Spring Festival is not a single day. It is a gravitational field stretching nearly a month, from the Little New Year on the 23rd day of the twelfth lunar month to the Lantern Festival on the 15th of the first lunar month. The official holiday, however, is usually seven days — from New Year’s Eve to the sixth day of the first month.

During these seven days, China practically shuts down.

This is not an exaggeration. Of China’s 1.4 billion people, at least a third are on the move. During the 2024 Chunyun period, total passenger trips exceeded nine billion. Train tickets go on sale fifteen days in advance, and popular routes sell out within thirty seconds. You read that right — thirty seconds.

If you’re traveling to China during Spring Festival, here’s what you need to know:

Transport: Flight and train ticket prices double or triple. Hotels in popular tourist cities surge in price. But — good news — the big cities actually empty out. Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, cities where migrant workers concentrate, lose over 30% of their population during Spring Festival. The subway is uncrowded, restaurants have no queues, and there’s an almost post-apocalyptic calm.

Businesses: Many restaurants and small shops close. Fast food chains (McDonald’s, KFC) and large malls usually stay open, but with reduced hours. Street-side noodle shops, barbershops, and fruit stalls all shut down — their owners have gone home for the holiday.

Atmosphere: On New Year’s Eve, all of China lights up with fireworks (though many cities have banned them, suburbs and rural areas remain lively). The Spring Festival Gala on CCTV is the world’s most-watched TV program, with over 700 million simultaneous viewers. On the first day of the new year, streets are eerily quiet — everyone is home eating dumplings, playing mahjong, and handing red envelopes to children.

Tiaoxi: China’s Unique “Borrow-a-Day” System

Seven days off for Spring Festival sounds great, right? But the catch is — you might have to work on the weekend before or after.

This is tiaoxi (tiáoxiū), a system that 1.4 billion Chinese people simultaneously love and hate.

The principle is straightforward: to create consecutive long holidays, the government swaps adjacent weekend days with workdays. For example, if National Day (October 1st) falls on a Wednesday, you might get Monday through Friday off plus the following weekend — but you’ll need to “repay” those days by working on the preceding or following Saturday.

The result: you might end up working seven consecutive days. Yes, seven. Six days before the holiday plus one makeup day after, or some other combination. When the annual tiaoxi schedule is announced, the complaints on social media rival a national sporting event.

Impact on tourists: On tiaoxi days (the Saturday or Sunday you work to “repay”), schools may be off, some attractions and malls operate on weekend schedules, and traffic is slightly heavier than a normal workday. If your itinerary falls on a tiaoxi day, don’t be fooled by “Saturday” on the calendar — it’s functionally a workday.

Golden Week: October’s National Migration

If Spring Festival means “going home,” then the National Day Golden Week means “going out to play.”

October 1st through 7th is a seven-day national holiday every year. It is the longest vacation besides Spring Festival and the peak travel season for Chinese tourists. During the 2024 National Day Golden Week, domestic tourist trips reached 820 million, with tourism revenue exceeding 700 billion yuan.

What does this mean? It means when you take a photo on the Great Wall, roughly two thousand strangers’ heads will be in your frame. It means Palace Museum tickets need to be snatched up ten days in advance. It means highways become parking lots — not metaphorically, literally, with people getting out of their cars to picnic on the roadside.

Tourist Survival Guide:

If you must visit China during Golden Week, consider less popular destinations — provinces like Gansu, Ningxia, and Guizhou have far lower tourist density than Beijing or Shanghai. Or do the opposite: stay in the big cities and enjoy the calm after locals have left for their trips.

Other Public Holidays at a Glance

When Is the Best Time to Visit?

After all this, the simple summary is: avoid Spring Festival and National Day.

The best windows are mid-March to late April (excluding the Qingming holiday), mid-June to mid-September (students are on summer break but adults are at work, manageable overall), and November through December. During these periods, flights are cheap, hotels are at normal prices, and attractions aren’t overcrowded.

That said — if you can handle the crowds, visiting China during Spring Festival or National Day shows you a completely different China. The collective ritual of an entire nation participating together, the spectacle of thirty million cars hitting the highway simultaneously, the shock of an entire skyline lit up by fireworks on New Year’s Eve — these are things you simply cannot see on ordinary days.

Sometimes, the inconvenience itself is part of the experience.

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