The least expected consequence of the lengthening of the weekend, an act which was intended to provide people with more opportunity for relaxation, has been the anxiety and irritability it has inspired. Will the two-day weekend on alternate weeks actually provide anyone with more leisure?
On Saturday, January 10, the government put the alternating two-day weekend policy, a policy whereby the second and fourth Saturdays of every month would be a day of rest, into effect. Even the weather cooperated. God seemed to bend the rules a little by blowing a cold front off the island and letting the sun shine. The bright sunshine and gentle breeze made it an ideal day for an outing.
There had been rumblings in Taiwan for some time about making Saturdays a day off. Government agencies such as the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) and the Central Personnel Administration (CPA) investigated, planned and then repeatedly fine-tuned the policy. Departments responsible for travel and leisure related resources, such as the Tourism Bureau, the Construction and Planning Administration (which oversees national parks), the Council for Cultural Affairs (which is responsible for cultural centers all over the island) and local governments all pitched in to create activities which would absorb the masses of people expected to be looking for something to do. Private enterprises were also rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the business opportunities which awaited them.
Volunteer organizations, on the other hand, took aim at people's desire to "do some good" and arranged even more volunteer activities for them. Meanwhile, the continuing education departments of many universities scheduled additional weekend classes. Figures involved in athletics were also excited, seeing the two extra Saturdays a month as an opportunity to finally begin building the sort of "athletic pyramid" that all the major sporting nations have.
But when the market opened trading in these new "leisure concept shares," their performance was flat, leaving many people feeling frustrated. At tourist spots and amusement parks around the island, not only were the crowds not up to expectations, in many places no one came at all.
Only two-and-a-half days
After the non-event, people began talking about its causes. Many felt that expectations for immediate results both inside the government and out had been too high.
According to CEPD research, the benefits of the two-day weekend are as follows: It saves commuting time and costs, and relieves traffic congestion; in double-income families, it allows better planning of family activities and improves parent-child relationships; it increases opportunities for getting outdoors, appreciating the arts and participating in sports, thereby improving the quality of life and encouraging more balanced development of the island's various regions; by replacing holidays scattered all over the calendar with two-day weekends, time use and production efficiency are improved; the weekend also provides opportunities for leisure businesses and stimulates consumption, thus providing a boost to the economy.
In implementing the alternate Saturdays policy, the CPA had hoped to gradually bring Taiwan's workweek into conformity with global trends. This year's implementation of a policy giving government workers the second and fourth Saturdays of every month off was the first step towards easing into the two-day weekend and reducing the number of working hours on Taiwan. But in order to avoid causing too big a jump in the number of holidays all at once, an action which might have hurt production at local firms, the government simultaneously gave eight memorial holidays the ax.
Government employees engaged in providing direct services to citizens now take their "weekends" in turns, thus maintaining seven-days-a-week service while working a five-day week. This allows vital functions such as police services, customs, medical services and transportation services to continue to operate year round without a break. Other government offices such as the Land Bureau and the Motor Vehicles Department, which interact closely with citizens, will continue to provide service five-and-a-half or six days a week. The CPA is also doing even more to ensure that the efficiency of government organizations is not affected.
Under the old calendar, there were eighteen national holidays, and before the institution of the alternate-Saturdays-off system, there were a total of 95 non-working days in a year. With the elimination of eight national holidays, under the new workweek policy there are now 99 non-working days in a year, an increase of only four days. Further, there are three election days this year. Under the old system, these would have meant three additional Saturdays (a half-day) off. Adding it all up, it means that workers are really only gaining two and a half days of additional holiday time this year, which really doesn't seem like very much.
"Although we had two Saturdays off in January, the second day of the New Year's holiday was canceled," says Miss Chen, a government employee. In the past, she and her husband typically took advantage of the two-day New Year's holiday in conjunction with the weekend to go south for three or four days to visit her mother. This year, they couldn't do it. She was afraid that using the two-day weekend would be too rushed and was worried about traffic on the highway. Instead of making the trip, they stayed home and cleaned up their apartment in preparation for the Lunar New Year's holiday at the end of the month.
On the other hand, there are many private firms in Taiwan which have operated on a five-day workweek for many years. According to statistics from the CEPD, 12% of all local companies employing more than 30 people offered their employees either a two-day weekend every week or alternate two-day weekends in 1991. As of 1996, this figure had grown to 17%. This is another reason that the implementation of the government's weekend policy did not have quite the impact expected.
Parental worries
Other problems surfaced immediately. Though schools implemented the policy in February, many parents work for private enterprises which have not implemented the policy and must now deal with the problem of there being no one to look after their children. This year, the King Car Education Foundation conducted a written survey on this topic in Taipei County and the cities of Taichung and Kaohsiung. The results showed that in 14% of the households surveyed, neither parent worked on Saturdays. In about half of the households, one parent needed to work on Saturdays, while in about 40% of the households, both parents worked on Saturdays, leaving no one to look after the children. This was a cause of anxiety among these parents.
The results also revealed differences between urban and suburban areas and an unequal distribution of social resources. In more than 50% of Taipei County households, where many people are employed as laborers and in service positions, both parents had to work on Saturdays. This figure is 20% higher than that of Taipei City. The problem parents face in arranging their children's weekends becomes more and more apparent the further south you go.
The survey revealed that more than 90% of parents hoped that schools could provide more space and arrange more activities for students on the weekends. If schools arranged such weekend activities, more than 82% of parents indicated that they would have their children participate. In addition, around 55% of parents hoped that schools would use Saturdays to arrange more parent-child activities. The problem is, of course, that if schools organize such weekend activities, their teachers and staff get virtually no weekend at all.
And what about students' hopes for the weekend? According to the survey, fewer than 10% of students would like to attend art and music classes. Meanwhile, more than 50% wanted to take trips into the country with their parents. Of the remainder, 16% wanted to stay home and 19% didn't know what they wanted. If they had to attend school on the weekend, the large majority of students preferred to attend "activity-oriented classes," which is to say "non-academic." The most popular option here was ball games, followed by home-economics classes, arts classes, literature classes and language classes.
These kinds of survey results seem to indicate that while parents want schools to organize more activities for their children, the kids want to spend more time with their parents. It seems that in the future, parents and children are going to have to talk a little about their weekend plans.
Wild Friday nights?
In addition to these concerns, others are worried that Taiwan's leisure facilities and transport systems won't be able to meet the demands of people concentrating their leisure activities onto the weekends.
For example, because of an inclination to "vulgar" pastimes and the lack of leisure-oriented resources, people may play more mahjong or gamble more. Friday nights may also become a peak time for drunken incidents and youth crime. Still more people are concerned that weekend traffic jams will begin on Friday evenings, preventing them from going anywhere.
To no one's surprise, all of these problems surfaced over this year's week-long Lunar New Year's holiday. When the long awaited "leisure concept shares" finally "hit the market," leisure spots all over the island and the roads to them were packed, creating traffic problems and causing damage to the environment. Those who "set out with great hopes only to return defeated" were left both angry and disappointed.
As one person who works in the media noted, in metropolitan Taipei, "The leisure industry was pushing its leisure facilities down people's throats all day long. Media packaging made for holiday crowds of historic dimensions on government-sponsored educational package tours and at private amusement parks, new department stores and even the Hollywood-transplanted Warner Village movie theater complex."
This year's traffic was also the most serious Taipei had ever seen. An example is the Hsinsheng elevated highway which, from the second day of the Lunar New Year on, was packed every afternoon in the direction heading to Chiang Kai-shek's former residence in Shihlin, which was just recently opened to the public.
When the Kaohsiung Museum of Science opened last year, it experienced disaster in the form of crowds which damaged exhibits. After staff had cleaned up, the museum hired a large number of temporary personnel and brought in additional volunteers to help see it through the Lunar New Year's holidays. But the nightmare repeated itself, and many volunteers were left scrubbing betelnut juice from the floors after the museum closed.
US$8 billion for overseas travel
"The negative effects always show up first," says Lin Wan-i, chairman of National Taiwan University's Department of Sociology. Lin thinks that these initial problems of the two-day weekend are due to a lack of early planning. "Take information as an example. Travel information came out too late. They waited until people were already on holiday before bringing it out and then there wasn't enough variety [in what was offered]. It was this that caused everyone to be concentrated on just a few roads.
Insufficient planning of the use of resources isn't something new. In 1992, Hsiao Hsin-huang of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Academia Sinica conducted research into how people in Taiwan spend their money. He found that in that year entertainment expenditures beat out food expenditures for the top spot for the first time.
"Looking at two surveys already conducted on Taiwanese people's use of time, since the end of the 1980s you can also see a trend to an increasing amount of personal or leisure time. In an article on leisure in Taiwan, Hsiao Hsin-huang suggests that growth in demand for leisure, entertainment and travel is something that should be looked at.
However, his research revealed that Taiwanese spend the bulk of their leisure time at home with their TVs. "If they went out, it was still to go somewhere indoors, whether to a friend's home or some other venue to meet people and make friends. Often, they bring their pressures with them. Even something like a shopping trip isn't necessarily a relaxing affair." He goes on to say: "Even when people really get out of the city, they come back on the same day. And although longer domestic and overseas trips are becoming a trend, their quality is still somewhat suspect."
To date, this demand for leisure activities still can't be met. In the case of travel, people are not satisfied with what domestic trips have to offer and are going abroad, increasing the amount of money Taiwanese spend on overseas travel. In 1996, 5.71 million Taiwanese traveled abroad spending a total of US$8.15 billion, an amount equal to 46% of what Taiwan earned from trade in that year.
"If Taiwan's tourism planning were far-sighted, some of that money spent on overseas travel would have been kept at home where it would have been used to build local tourism facilities, and there wouldn't be such a lack of these today," says Lin Wan-i.
Demand for community facilities
"We should change the direction of our leisure resources planning," says Huang Chen-hsing, a professor in the physical education department of National Chung Cheng University. His research reveals that among those with a lower level of education, the main leisure-time activities are "community-focused" pastimes such as taking it easy, visiting friends, chatting with neighbors and shopping. For them, taking long trips comes somewhat further down the list. For those with a college education or above, the situation is just the opposite. Their main leisure-time activities are taking trips and reading, while activities such as visiting friends, doing research and going to the movies appear further down on their lists. "What this means is that the long trips which are the emphasis of planning by government agencies involved with tourism are only of frequent use to one segment of the society."
He says that in the past, the government's tourism planning focused only on long trips that brought in people from outside the community. It hasn't ever considered the needs of local communities or provided communities with local leisure-time activities. In fact, most folks depend far more on local facilities such as parks, green spaces and athletic facilities for leisure than they do on long trips.
"As large and diverse as Taipei County is, community-oriented leisure facilities would be particularly helpful in relieving stress and improving the quality of its residents' lives. Such facilities would also prompt local culture to develop itself. It is these kinds of facilities that should be the focus of tourism and leisure [planning]," says Huang.
When Chen Chi-nan, now head of the department of traditional arts at the National Institute for the Arts, was assistant director of the Council for Cultural Affairs, he promoted community culture with great vigor. Chen feels that two-day weekend planning should move in the direction of community development: "More leisure time doesn't directly translate into improved productivity for society or individuals. Usually, when the amount of leisure time increases, what it does is to increase the options that individuals and society have for living a varied life."
Taiwan, however, has an integrated economic system. Its developmental and economic policies have always been set by the central government. Such centralized policy making has wiped out traditional local industries. Even the island's leisure and entertainment pursuits are Western transplants seen nationwide. This kind of trend has meant the loss of local color, and the various regions of Taiwan have no specifically local charm to speak of. This has created a situation wherein the whole of Taiwan lacks any kind of varied cultural life. Even the unique character of little villages and their traditional industries are fading away.
"The resiliency of traditional local industries derives from their compatibility with the local environment and culture. A prerequisite for their development is that [Taiwan's] citizens have more leisure time and that there be an increase in domestic travel," says Chen Chi-nan. Chen says that the two-day weekend could revive local industries, and provide small towns with a way to move forward.
Good to your family and yourself
"Not only do we need to make the environment more suitable, we also need to change our habits and thinking about leisure," says Lin Wan-yi. Lin says that with regard to Taiwan's leisure-time habits, you have to remember that the whole society only went from being an agricultural one to an industrial one 20 or 30 years ago. "The traditional Chinese agrarian society didn't operate on a system of weeks. People's holidays were folk festivals and their way of celebrating them was active and noisy."
If the two-day weekend is giving people headaches about how to best "celebrate" it, then the weekend has lost its "leisure" component, and its whole purpose has been turned on its ear.
Author Hsiao Yeh, known for his books about his family life, thinks that the chaos brought about by the new two-day weekends is similar to the chaos that surrounded Taiwan's desire for the lifting of martial law and for a more open society in the early 1980s. The chaos was a kind of birthing pain as the society changed from one in which people were controlled from above to one in which they were able to make decisions for themselves.
"Many Taiwanese are forced to be busy by the pressures of life, but there are certainly others who keep busy only as a means of avoiding taking charge of their own lives. These people would rather have their life arranged by their companies or by other people. This reflects a culture in which one is used to being controlled," he says. What he is saying is that many people just do not know how to be not busy, how to make a space in which to live. Being busy is therefore sometimes simply an excuse to avoid making a life for oneself.
It would be hard to move from being controlled to self-determination without some pain and confusion. At this time, we must learn things anew, adapt and develop new ways of thinking.
Hsiao Yeh mentions his own experience as an example. He says that he used to be a typical Taiwanese man, one who kept busy to avoid having open spaces in his life, to avoid developing himself and to avoid interacting with his family. Although he always came home for dinner on time, he spent most of his time at home on the phone talking about business. Even at the Lunar New Year when Taiwanese get a few well earned days off, he would bring out some never-ending tasks to work on to avoid dealing with his leisure time. The result was that: "I gradually lost all feeling for the world around me. I felt removed from myself. I became more and more empty inside and more and more unhappy. Then I used more work to anesthetize myself to the emptiness and unhappiness I felt."
Things continued like this until he left his job and became a freelance writer. He no longer needed to punch a time-card or go to work. He no longer had a boss and was no longer controlled by anyone. Facing a huge expanse of unstructured time, he noticed: "I began to feel anxious, insecure and afraid. But all of these reactions forced me to become the master of my own life."
He fashioned a new life for himself from the ground up, doing things like using a wide-open day to search out things he hadn't done in a long time and do them: he read books he had been wanting to read; he strolled in the mountains; he weeded the planters; he sat and listened to a whole CD or tape; he danced, sang and wrote his thoughts in his notebook*. "When I started rebuilding my life, I discovered a happiness I had never felt."
"We need to be good to ourselves before we can be good to our families. Otherwise, when we have a free day, family members gain nothing but even more opportunities to attack and hurt one another," says Hsiao Yeh.
Master of your own time
Author Nanfang Shuo, who is the senior writer at The Journalist, a weekly news magazine, and is known for his social criticism, says that the implementation of the twice monthly two-day weekends this year will give Taiwanese people a new start at learning how to manage their time and their lives. Faced with the prospect of increasing rather than decreasing amounts of free time in their future, Taiwanese must open themselves to new ways of dealing with their time.
He says that when people get time, they are able to take part in more "non-productive" activities and a new kind of productive activity is created, one for which quality matters. When people have a more leisurely life, an interest in food and drink, travel, culture, entertainment and community activities is engendered. Demand increases and prompts reform, changing the old "close enough for government work" ethic into one of greater refinement and attention to detail. "People can't rough it forever. When refinement begins to appear, then life begins to take on more value," he says.
An increase in leisure time obviously provides people with more lifestyle options, but also challenges their ability to make use of their time. It's a bit like the problem of setting paint to a white canvas. Future weekends are waiting for the brush.
p.6
With flowers blossoming everywhere in the lovely springtime weather,
it looks like the two-day weekend came at just the right time.
p.8
(left, right) Whether it be by making a trip to a suburban "tourist" farm to dig sweet potatoes or by gardening on the roof of their own apartment building, city-dwellers "steal a half-day of leisurely drifting on life's waters," getting a rare taste of country life.
p.10
"Today is Saturday. All the other kids have the day off and since my mother and father still have to work, I'm the only one who still has to come to day care*." The alternating two-day weekends don't yet apply to everyone. In the case of families with children, some have it good while others suffer.
p.11
Even if they have the day off themselves, most parents still hope that schools and community groups can help out by arranging weekend activities for their kids.
p.12
Enthusiasm for volunteer activities is growing in Taiwan. People are using their free time to help others, helping themselves at the same time.
Devout Christians who spend their Sundays in church are especially appreciative of the two-day weekend as it gives them one full day to themselves every other week.
p.14
Culture and Leisure in Taiwan 1996
Public libraries
414
Libraries per 100,000 population
1.92
Cultural centers
22
Total area devoted to outdoor recreation
58,748 Hectares
Area per 10,000 population
27.36 Hectares
Monthly non-working hours per capita
531Hours
Leisure expenditure
as % of total consumption
7.25%
Overseas trips per 1000 population
266.47
Vacation trips within Taiwan per person
2.99
Newspaper subscriptions per 100 households
56.45
Magazine subscriptions per 100 households
15.81
Source: Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics
Social Indicators in Taiwan Area of the Republic of China, 1996
(graphics by Lee Su-ling)
p.16
(left, right) Long limited by problems of insufficient land and facilities and restrictive regulations, recreational facilities for Taiwan's youth are eagerly awaiting development.
Today is Saturday. All the other kids have the day off and since my mother and father still have to work, I'm the only one who still has to come to day care. . . ." The alternating two-day weekends don't yet apply to everyone. In the case of families with children, some have it good while others suffer.
Even if they have the day off themselves, most parents still hope that schools and community groups can help out by arranging weekend activities for their kids.
Enthusiasm for volunteer activities is growing in Taiwan. People are using their free time to help others, helping themselves at the same time.
Devout Christians who spend their Sundays in church are especially appreciative of the two-day weekend as it gives them one full day to themselves every other week .
（left, right） Long limited by problems of insufficient land and facilities and restrictive regulations, recreational facilities for Taiwan's youth are eagerly awaiting development.
（left, right） Long limited by problems of insufficient land and facilities and restrictive regulations, recreational facilities for Taiwan's youth are eagerly awaiting development.
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