Don’t Let the Chinese Holiday Schedule Take Your Production by Surprise

About the Holidays

A major complaint and hurdle that foreign companies encounter with China manufacturing and China Sourcing is delays of final delivery dates. It is not unusual for a delivery to end up being made 2 weeks later than expected by the buyer. However, most of these delays are in fact not due to any lack of attention or negligence during the manufacturing but rather miscommunications and a culture gap between the Chinese supplier and foreign buyer. Most of the time these delays can usually be attributed to various Chinese holidays as well as harvests, during which times the country as a whole can regularly experience massive worker migrations. This can particularly cause a lot of confusion as the Chinese holiday schedule holds almost no parallels with the western, Judeo-Christian one, causing confusion for those unaccustomed to it.

Thus, with two major upcoming holidays in China, the mid-autumn festival from September 10th-12th and the National holiday from October 1st-7th. Below you can find the official public holiday calendar, which we hope can help you to better manage your China sourcing. Please note that some of the holidays operate on the lunar calendar and thus change from year to year, such as the traditional holidays Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival, however others, like the Gregorian Calendar New Years and the National Holiday in October, are fixed dates. Another unique aspect of Chinese holidays is the system of “making-up” missed workdays. You will notice in the graphic below that certain weekend days are highlighted in gray for “Need to Work”. This is for catching up on days missed due to holiday.

Notes:

• Dates marked by red color are legal holidays, while those marked by grey are work days although they are weekends.
• Although we have many holidays in China, generally speaking, two of them in particular require your attention, both of which last for one week. One is the Spring Festival in February, and the other one is National Day in October.
• There are two harvest seasons that are not marked on the calendar: at the ends of May and September. These can effect delivery dates of factory orders, particularly if a factory has many workers that are also farmers and must return to their homes/villages during this time.
• The months not listed above are normal and have no holidays.

We hope this information was helpful, and if you have any other specific questions on Chinese holiday scheduling and how it could effect you, please feel free to comment below and we would be happy to help!

• Iris Zhou- CPG Sourcing Associate