Let’s Have More 3 Day Weekends!

Isn’t it great to have a three-day weekend? We have a little extra time to breathe, sleep in, maybe go somewhere. We should have more of them.

But there’s nothing we can do about that… right?

Well—maybe. Unless we were more like China. In China, they noticed the same problem: people want longer holidays. More specifically, the tourism industry wanted longer holidays, but businesses don’t want to give up too many workdays. So instead of fighting about it, they rearranged the calendar.

In 1999 , they invented something called 调休 (tiáoxiū)—”adjusted rest.” It’s a system of make-up working days, where weekends are sometimes converted into regular workdays called “special working days” to create longer blocks of time off around major holidays.

And you know what? It’s absolutely brilliant. And also completely insane. Let me explain.

What China Actually Did (Calendar Tetris, Government Edition)

Picture this: Next Tuesday is Dragon Boat Festival—a nice little one-day holiday. The government is so nice that they even give you Monday off to connect it to the weekend. Then your Chinese colleague casually mentions, “Oh, by the way, we’re working this Saturday to make up for it.”

Wait… what?

This is adjusted rest in action. China takes their holidays and engineers them into blocks by borrowing weekend days. That three-day weekend you’re enjoying? You may have worked a Saturday or Sunday to “earn” it.

It happens all the time throughout the Chinese calendar. Here’s the 2025 Chinese calendar. Note the special working days.

Why It Worked in China

This system works in China because of something you see everywhere there: an almost supernatural ability for society-wide coordination around shared priorities.

Take gaokao (高考), China’s college entrance exam. The entire country comes to a standstill for three days in June—construction sites go silent, airlines reroute flights, and businesses turn down music. It’s not just government policy; it’s collective buy-in because everyone understands this matters.

The same cultural DNA makes adjusted rest work. When the government says, “We’re all working Saturday so everyone can have meaningful family time,” there’s immediate social consensus. Chinese workers embraced this system because it delivers what they genuinely value: real time for family visits across this massive country. When your parents live 1,000 miles away, a single day off is useless. But a week-long Chinese New Year break? That’s life-changing.

When Beijing publishes the holiday calendar each October, 1.4 billion people simply adjust accordingly. No endless debates, no union disputes—an entire civilization synchronizes like a coordinated dance.

Why It Would Never Work in America

Now imagine trying to implement a make-up day policy in the United States. It would be chaos.

It doesn’t work for us because we’re too beautifully, chaotically diverse. Just think about all the observant Jews who can’t work on Saturday for religious reasons. Or the millions of retail and service workers whose schedules are already scattered across seven days a week. Or the parents juggling childcare around school schedules that don’t align with federal holidays. Or the freelancers and gig workers who don’t even have traditional weekends to begin with.

We’re just not the type of society that’s good at making collective decisions, even when they’d benefit everyone. Try to get Americans to agree on synchronized vacation schedules and you’ll trigger the same cultural immune response that makes us argue about daylight saving time for decades without ever actually changing anything.

What We Do Instead

So what do we do in the US instead? We move the holidays. That’s why most federal holidays that fall on weekends get shifted to the nearest Monday, creating automatic three-day weekends without anyone having to work extra days. It’s a far simpler and more elegant solution for our individualistic culture. No make-up days, no synchronized scheduling, no arguments about who has to work when. When Washington’s birthday falls on a Wednesday, we just shift it to the nearest Monday.

The trade-off? We don’t get those spectacular week-long vacation blocks that China engineers. Our longest federal holiday weekend tops out at three days. But for a country that can’t even agree on what to call carbonated beverages, maybe that’s about all the coordination we can realistically handle.