The Holidays, Chinese Style

Some times Chinese New Year/Spring Festival is hard to understand. I had one client ask me “Why did they schedule CNY right at the same time as the trade show?” Real question. But scheduling the lunar calendar aside, CNY can be pretty difficult to deal with if you’re trying to manufacture on a deadline.What doesn’t matter is whose house on what day you’re supposed to go to and what gifts you’re supposed to bring for which relative. What does matter is that you’re still trying to meet production deadlines in February and your labor force is all going home for an untold number of days/weeks.CNY more than just a single holiday—it’s the equivalent of “The Holidays” in the West—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus and New Years all rolled in a 7-14 day period and then multiplied by 1.5 billion. Which for manufacturing adds up to a month of disruption.Here are some of the reasons why it’s such a confusing wonderful holiday experience:1. Most of the 1.5 billion Chinese are low wage laborers. They aren’t emotionally connected to their job and have no incentive to stick around (think about when you had a part time job at the supermarket/fast food chain in high school). There are more jobs than workers and this means that people leave early and come back late. Why wouldn’t they? They can have their pick of jobs when they get back.2. The logistics in China can been good, especially when compared to India or SEA, but they are still not good enough to handle the largest mass migration in the history of the world—EVERY YEAR! Train tickets and buss tickets are sold out the day they go on sale. Ditto for international and domestic airplane tickets nowadays. There just aren’t enough vehicles, plane and simple—so people leave early and stay late because they don’t have any other choice.3. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is on vacation at the same time and everyone, and again I mean everyone, is “going home.” These means that a few hundred million people are going west the first week of CNY and the same few hundred million are coming back east at the end of the holiday. You may think that I’m exaggerating here. But let me give you some context. Shopping on “black Friday” (Friday after T-Day) in the US is the worst/busiest day of the year, right? My wife, who is Chinese, willing goes to Wal-Mart and other malls on this day in the US—with nary a second though. Why? Because “there are more people than this shopping at Wal-Mart every day in China. What’s the problem?!” See, unless you have “experienced” China for yourself, you just won’t understand. Second, the affects of mass migration. Have you seen “I am Legacy” with Will Smith? Well the streets of Shenzhen look just like those NY streets (sans lions) for about a week. No one is from here and so for CNY no one stays here. Really! If you’ve never seen 500 million people all travel at the same time, you’ve really never lived (ok, so it’s more like a near-death experience).4. Until this year, the government scheduled everyone’s official vacation at the same three times each year (this year it’s now just two “Golden Weeks” and a couple of long weekends). This means that anyone that can takes as much time as they can get at those three times. It also means that everyone with any vacation flexibility at all does the same thing at the same time! I can’t over state this enough—really, honestly, everyone leaves all at the same time!5. Dates are relative. Unlike the fixed dates of most Western holidays, the days of actual CNY are based on the lunar calendar so they move each year. But more confusing that this is the fact that businesses and factories will typically not just schedule arbitrary dates months in advance but will break when orders from big clients are also ending. Many times a factory with pending orders will, as late as a few weeks before actual CNY, not yet have decided what days it will be closed. This means that no one factory will have the same vacation as any other factory. Sure most people will get, this year, the 7th through the 10th off, but before or after that—it’s all a crapshoot. We have factories starting their holiday on the 27th of this month. Others on the 5th of Feb.6. While the type of gift isn’t really important here, what you get may surprise you. Most gifts given on this holiday are of two kinds—money in red envelopes and gifts from one’s hometown (working on a photo). This maybe the 21st century but a factory gift of a smoked duck or leg of cured ham (unpackaged) is still commonplace in big-city Shenzhen. Tasty too!7. Fourth of July, smorth of July. Here we get fireworks displays just about every night starting a couple of weeks before the actual CNY date and lasting well past the “holiday.” Also, every new business wants to open up at the beginning of the year—it’s an auspicious time. So there are HUGE strings of firecrackers going off every day along the streets for weeks on end. And if you haven’t seen the fireworks display in Hong Kong you haven’t seen fireworks! (OK, I know the Hong Kong show is on Jan 1, but still, it’s a great show.)If you’re manufacturing in China this year all this means that anytime from the end of January to the end of February you could have any one or all of your suppliers off line for weeks at a time. For example. We do a stitched product that could be finished before CNY but the fabric factory is taking an early vacation (to accommodate a larger client) and so we can’t get fabric delivery until just after CNY. But the stitching factory and the packaging factory are taking, for the same reasons, late vacations. Effectively killing the project for 30 days for a 4-day holiday.Happy CNY and enjoy the fireworks!