The 13-Day Dream That Wasn't

The booking window for National Day airfares opened ten days earlier than usual. August hadn’t even ended, yet over 60 percent of the chartered cars for the Xinjiang loop had already been locked in, and the wooden cabins in Kanas were tagged “sold out for National Day.” Travel platforms recorded a 61 percent year‑on‑year surge in search traffic—the media called it “the craze for combining holidays.”

The algorithms all picked up the same action: searching for “take 3 days off to get 13 days.” Typing those six characters in the search box costs nothing—anyone can do it. But the people who actually submit a leave request after searching are a different story.

September 25 (Mid‑Autumn Festival) and October 1 (National Day) are separated by exactly three working days—September 28, 29, and 30. That perfect “leave window” on the calendar was screenshotted and spread across social media; travel bloggers rushed out 13‑day itineraries, and the comment sections were flooded with “copying your homework.”

At the same time, another set of data sat at the bottom of the reports: the nationwide implementation rate of paid annual leave is about 60 percent, meaning nearly 40 percent of employees have never fully used their statutory annual leave. Among private‑sector workers, the average number of days actually taken is less than four.

The same leave application can have completely different fates depending on the type of employer.

For employees in government agencies and public institutions, the approval process is transparent—the rules clearly specify how many days, how to take them, and how to make up for them. Supervisors have no discretionary power to reject a legitimate request. For this group, combining holidays is purely an arithmetic problem.

But for the 60‑plus percent of urban employees working in private enterprises, “asking for leave” has never been a purely mathematical issue.

Li Wei worked as a planner at an advertising agency for three years. She had five days of annual leave, which she took in two separate instances: once when her mother needed surgery, and once when she herself ran a fever of 39°C and had to be carried to the hospital by colleagues. After that second leave, her quarterly performance rating was downgraded from A to B+. No one gave an explicit reason, but at her first weekly meeting back, her manager said, “In our line of work, clients don’t wait.”

She never again applied for a full stretch of consecutive leave.

Five years, five days. That is the statutory entitlement under China’s Regulations on Paid Annual Leave for Employees for those who have worked between one and ten years. Where does that number stand among major economies? The European Union mandates four weeks of annual leave—that’s 20 working days. The UK gives 5.6 weeks. Japan starts at ten days and increases with seniority. Australia gives four weeks. Even South Korea and Singapore, known for their intense work cultures, mandate between ten and fifteen days.

Five days. The essence of a problem often lies in the simplest numbers.

But the bigger issue than “only five days” is that those days are often impossible to actually take.

A survey by a major recruitment platform found that over 70 percent of respondents feel uneasy when asking their manager for leave. That unease isn’t groundless—before requesting leave, you have to assess project progress, line up a backup, test your manager’s attitude, and navigate countless unspoken rules. Even after clearing all hurdles, one sentence—“We’re in a peak season right now, could you pick another time?”—can wipe out all your plans.

An employee at an internet company shared an experience on social media: he planned his National Day combination leave two months in advance, booked flights and hotels, and on the day he submitted his request, his manager replied with just four characters: “Put it on hold.” He didn’t press further. That screenshot was circulated many times; some commenters said, “You could have asked,” but far more replied, “If he asked, he’d lose his job.”

Even more insidious than the structural difficulty is the invisible drain during the time you are supposedly on leave.

A survey by a research institute showed that over 90 percent of professionals still handle work messages or join online meetings while on vacation. A phone vibration triggers an instinctive unlock; you’re halfway through capturing a sunrise from the hotel balcony when a work group chat pings with an @everyone. Vacation becomes a state of “being on standby somewhere else.”

“I asked for leave, but I know I can’t turn off my phone.”

That sentence appeared in a workplace forum post titled “Take three days off to get thirteen? I don’t dare.” The thread drew over two hundred replies, the most upvoted of which said: “Let us first dare to take five days, then we’ll talk about thirteen.”

Why has taking leave become such a heavily weighed decision for so many?

The reasons break down into three layers, each embedded in everyday routines—not slogans, not grand narratives.

First, the law lacks real teeth. The Labour Law provides for annual leave, but the penalties for non‑compliant employers are too weak to act as a deterrent. Labour inspection resources are limited, and the path for individual legal action is too long—arbitration, evidence gathering, waiting for a ruling—and by the time it’s over, your job may already be gone. Most people choose not to speak up.

Second, the profit motive of enterprises overrides employees’ right to rest. Li Wei from the ad agency, the internet company employee—their stories are not anomalies. Many companies operate with razor‑thin staffing: “one person for one slot.” Losing even one person means project delays. Managers are naturally inclined to reject long leave requests unless the employee proves they are “irreplaceable”—which ironically traps people in a cycle of “the more competent you are, the more indispensable you become, and the less you can leave.”

Third, a cultural inertia around “struggle.” Phrases like “young people should work hard” and “taking leave shows you’re not committed” are openly spoken in many workplaces. Taking the initiative to ask for leave is seen as a “bad attitude,” while chronic overtime is silently regarded as “showing responsibility.” When leave is transformed from a legal right into a special favor to be earned, its cost is no longer just a few days’ pay, but a composite hit to your workplace credibility, performance rating, and managerial impressions.

This cultural inertia manifests in a single sentence, a glance, a performance gap that everyone understands but no one names aloud.

Liu Ting works as a front desk clerk at a chain hotel in Kunming, earning 4,200 yuan a month, with five days of annual leave. She has never taken more than a single day off at a time. “If I take one day off, I lose my perfect attendance bonus—300 yuan. My daily wage is only 140.” She said this while checking in a guest; on the bottom right corner of her computer screen, a news push notification popped up: “Mid‑Autumn and National Day combined leave strategy goes viral, long‑haul travel bookings boom.”

She didn’t click on it. She went back to scanning ID cards, verifying information, handing out room keys.

She repeated that set of motions eight times, then looked up at the clock on the wall—four more hours until her shift ended.

Eight thousand kilometres away in Berlin, Simon, a project manager at a small design firm, had just submitted his annual leave plan: three consecutive weeks in July, hiking in northern Norway. He has thirty days of annual leave. His manager replied with one email: “OK, have a safe trip.”

Nothing more.

This gap reflects two fundamentally different default settings for the relationship between labour and rest. In countries where annual leave commonly exceeds twenty days, rest is seen as a basic input for reproducing labour power—not a “benefit” the company bestows, but a necessary investment in long‑term productivity. Research shows that prolonged lack of rest steadily erodes creativity and judgment. In the other default setting, leave is still viewed as “doing less work,” and doing less work means “not working hard enough.”

Different default settings lead to entirely different logics.

What can be done? Three concrete paths exist—but without resorting to slogans.

First, sharpen the law’s teeth. For example, make leave‑implementation rates a key indicator in labour inspections, increase penalties for repeat violators, and simplify the individual grievance process to lower the threshold for employees who are afraid to speak up.

Second, shift leave decisions from “managerial discretion” to “team‑based mechanisms.” Some companies are experimenting with staggered holidays and internal team‑led scheduling, distributing the pressure away from a single manager. When leave becomes a transparent system rather than a favour, employees’ initiative naturally improves.

Third, offer positive incentives through tax or subsidy policies. For instance, provide partial social‑insurance rebates to companies that consistently implement annual leave well. Make “letting employees rest” beneficial to the employer as well, not just a pure burden.

These proposals are not new, but they are concrete. Institutional improvement is always slow; changing mindsets is even slower. Yet the prerequisite for any shift is that someone is willing to present those silent data points, rather than fixating solely on the 61 percent growth in search traffic.

Let’s return to the starting image: on a September weekday, a person sits at their desk, opens the system, and submits a three‑day leave request. The cursor blinks for over ten seconds in the “reason for leave” field.

He types two characters: “Rest.”

Then he clicks submit.

The approval status shows: pending.

He waits. That “approved” or “rejected” status is tied to more than just flights and hotels—it is tied to something more fundamental: whether a person has the right to claim an uninterrupted stretch of time without having to explain why they need it.

And that should never have been a question that needs to be debated over and over again.