Most want change to holidays, poll finds

More than four in five mainlanders dislike the way Beijing sets public holidays, according to a government survey conducted in the wake of another crowded and chaotic "golden week".

As of last night, more than 80 per cent of the nearly two million internet users who responded to an online survey by the State Council's office in charge of national holidays said they were "dissatisfied with the current holiday arrangement".

The poll, which was being conducted on four major web portals, as well as the websites run by the People's Daily and Xinhua, comes after a week-long National Day holiday marked by congested roads, packed tourist sites, scuffles and scams.

The crowds are partly the result of Beijing's 14-year-old practice of consolidating public holidays into single blocks. The idea was to encourage domestic spending by making it easier for workers to go on long journeys with their families.

But the development of the country's infrastructure has not kept pace with the ever-larger holiday migrations, with an estimated 700 million mainlanders hitting the road for National Day this year.

In one of the most chaotic scenes, more than 4,000 tourists were left stranded for up to 10 hours and forced to walk several kilometres in the dark to catch shuttle buses out of Jiuzhaigou national park in Sichuan province on October 2.

This year was particularly stressful for holidaymakers because the State Council decided to make employees work eight out of the nine days between the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival break and the seven-day National Day break.