Spring Festival is the shutdown people plan around, and it has its own page here. It is also not the one that catches most Western buyers, because everybody has heard of it.
The one that catches people is Golden Week, and the reason is calendar collision: it starts on 1 October, which is roughly when a buyer in Europe or North America starts thinking about ordering for Christmas. The order feels early. It is placed into the week the entire supply chain stops.
The rest of the calendar
Chinese public holidays come from two different calendars, which is why half of them move.
- New Year's Day, 1 January. Short, and mostly harmless.
- Spring Festival, lunar, landing somewhere between late January and late February. The long one.
- Qingming, the tomb-sweeping festival, in early April. Short, and tied to a solar term rather than a fixed date.
- Labour Day, from 1 May. Officially brief, in practice usually stretched into a longer contiguous break.
- Dragon Boat Festival, lunar, falling in May or June depending on the year.
- Mid-Autumn Festival, lunar, in September or early October — and in some years it sits directly next to National Day, which merges two breaks into one long one.
- National Day, from 1 October, commonly called Golden Week.
The length of each is not fixed. It is set year by year in a published national arrangement, so the only reliable version is the one for the year you are ordering in — and, more practically, your agent's own holiday notice, since that is the schedule your parcel is subject to.
The make-up weekend
This is the mechanism that surprises people, and it works in both directions.
Longer breaks are frequently assembled by moving weekend days around: an adjacent Saturday or Sunday is designated a working day so that the holiday itself runs several days without a gap. That has two consequences worth knowing.
First, a holiday described as three days can be a longer continuous stop, because the weekend either side has been rearranged around it.
Second, a Saturday can be a full working day in China, which means a seller replying on a weekend is not unusual, and a seller not replying on a Tuesday might be perfectly normal. If you are reading a business's state from its response times, the Western weekend assumption misleads in both directions.
Golden Week is not a small Spring Festival
They fail differently, and treating one as a miniature version of the other leads to the wrong preparation.
Spring Festival empties workplaces for an extended period as the workforce travels home, so its dominant effect is production stopping and a long, staggered restart. Golden Week is a travel week too, but a shorter one, and its dominant effect is congestion — a rush of shipments before it, a hard queue during, and a compressed backlog after.
What makes Golden Week worse than its length suggests is what it runs into. The weeks that follow it are peak season for freight out of China in every industry, not just this one, heading into the Western fourth quarter. The backlog does not clear into a quiet market; it clears into a busy one. That is also when quotes on the same line move, for reasons set out in why the same line quotes differently week to week.
Read it by symptom, not by date
You will usually notice a holiday from the inside, as a symptom, before you connect it to a calendar.
- A seller reads and does not reply. The most common one, and the least informative — it looks identical to being ignored, and identical to being scammed.
- The seller says shipped and tracking does not move. Domestic couriers inside China are running a queue, and the first leg to the agent's warehouse is where items sit.
- The parcel is checked in but no QC photos appear. Photography needs staff on the floor. A thin warehouse means a long queue before the holiday and a longer one after.
- The shipping quote is worse than you remembered. Capacity, not conspiracy.
- A dispute goes quiet mid-thread. This is the dangerous one, because agent-side windows for raising or escalating a problem can keep running while the people who could resolve it are away. Disputes and refunds covers what those windows are and why you act inside them.
Our record is silent on all of it
Stated plainly, because the alternative is dressing up an absence as insight.
Across 237 quoted comments about 124 sellers, not one names Golden Week, National Day, Qingming, Labour Day, the Dragon Boat Festival or the Mid-Autumn Festival. Exactly one comment uses the word "holiday" at all, it is from June rather than any of these periods, and it is a buyer trying to work out whether he was being ignored or whether nobody was there. It is quoted in full on the Spring Festival page and there is no point in us printing it twice.
So nothing on this page is a measurement. It is the mechanism, and the mechanism is not in dispute: everyone in the chain is in one country with a shared calendar. Read how the evidence was collected for what sits behind this site.
What to actually do
- Look up the year's published arrangement before you commit to anything time-bound, and treat your agent's own notice as the operative one.
- Ask, in writing, whether an item is in stock or made to order. A production stop only matters if something is being produced for you.
- Ship what is ready rather than holding the haul open. Waiting for one item across a national shutdown means paying storage to wait for someone who is not at work — the decision rule is in when to consolidate and when to ship.
- Move the deadline, not the hope. If a date sits on the far side of a holiday, rebuild the plan from the date backwards, as in ordering reps for a specific date.
- Do not open a dispute the day before a holiday if you can open it the week before instead, and do not read silence as theft while the country is shut.
None of this requires knowing Chinese holiday law. It requires knowing the calendar exists, checking it once a year, and building the parcel before it rather than during. If you have not ordered yet, how to buy reps has the sequence, and the link decoder recovers a product link that stopped working while everyone was away.