A move by the Chinese central government to remove Chinese New Year Eve as public holiday has triggered outrage among the people.

Chinese New Year, which is also known as the Spring Festival in China, is an important traditional Chinese holiday, especially on the eve, as families gather for ‘family reunion dinner’ on ‘the end of the old year’ to celebrate the arrival of the Lunar New Year on the next day.

Next year, the Spring Festival Eve falls on Jan 30 (Thursday). However, the Chinese government has dropped the eve as a public holiday, sparking anger among Chinese netizens.

“No public holiday on the eve, how can people from around the country be able to return home? Better remove the first day of the Chinese New Year as a public holiday, too,” a netizen commented on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo’s discussion, titled ‘2014 Holiday Arrangements: No public holiday on Chinese New Year Eve’.

To date, the discussion has accumulated more than 1,187,102 comments since the announcement yesterday.

However, some experts backed the government’s decision.

South China Morning Post reported Tsinghua University professor Cai Jiming as saying their survey found that most companies and government agencies would give their staff the day off on Spring Festival Eve, regardless of whether it was an official holiday or not.

Cai said most people had forgotten that before 2008, Spring Festival Eve was not a public holiday, adding the government only made it official in 2008 because there had been urgings to honour the tradition.

He has been commissioned by the government to carry out research on the public holiday reform.

The Chinese government adjusts the public holiday every year due to the discrepancy between the Chinese lunar and western calendars, and the Spring Festival public holiday will only begin on the first day of the Chinese New Year (Jan 31).

- Bernama