China mulls new holiday calendar

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has suggested changes to the nation's holiday calendar, a move backers hope will ease the travel chaos during the current May Day "golden week" break and put the emphasis back on traditional Chinese festivals.

The Xinhua news agency said on Friday the government had proposed replacing the week-long May holiday, marked every year by a colossal exodus of city-dwellers heading for their ancestral villages, with a simple one-day break for May Day.

In return, the plan would provide additional one-day holidays to mark the springtime Qingming festival, when families traditionally tend ancestral tombs, the Dragon Boat Festival in early summer, and the Mid-Autumn Festival, when countless millions enjoy sweet "moon cakes".

The proposal, posted on Internet sites for public comment, would also add a day to the Lunar New Year holiday. The break would start a day earlier, giving people relief from the stress of rushing home from work or school to prepare for the biggest festival in the traditional calendar.

The October National Day break, when rail and air travel systems, tourist attractions, shops and hotels heave under the weight of hundreds of millions of vacationers, would not change.

The plan would increase the number of legal national holidays from 10 to 11 days, Xinhua said. If accepted, the new calendar could be in place for the next Lunar New Year holiday, which falls in 2008 in the first week of February.

The changes are unlikely to make much difference to hundreds of millions of workers who employers expect to toil in factories, restaurants and shops even during the official breaks.

But supporters said the plan would help revive traditional festivals and customs eroded in China's frenzied rush to economic prosperity. Many of these had already been strongly discouraged during the first decades of Communist rule.

"Making traditional festivals legal holidays will help carry forward Chinese history and culture," Ji Baocheng, a university president and member of the national parliament, told Xinhua.

Hundreds of thousands of people have already left comments about the proposal on Web sites, the vast majority applauding the proposed changes, the report said.

But some also raised problems.

"We still cannot go back home for a family reunion during the traditional festivals if there is only one day off," said one posting, according to Xinhua.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley, editing by Roger Crabb)