Quotable

Pieced-together vacations might still be in existence for a while, but paid vacations are definitely the way to go."

Cai Jiming, a professor at Tsinghua University, comments on the news of the shutdown of an office tasked with scheduling national holidays. The functions of the 14-year-old National Holiday Office have been incorporated into a higher ministerial joint conference presided over by Vice-Premier Wang Yang. In recent years, the office has attracted criticism for awkwardly pieced-together holidays. When Chinese lunar holidays fell in the middle of the week, the NHO tended to create longer holidays around them and made people work weekends in exchange for the time off. Many complained that arrangement crushed their dreams of quality leisure time. Cai said the new conference will take people's opinions into account.