Does China have Emancipation Days?
Not observed here
China's national holiday list contains nothing on abolition or emancipation. The Measures on Holidays for National Annual Festivals and Commemorative Days (State Council Order No. 795, fourth revision of 10 November 2024, in force from 1 January 2025) set out, in article 2, the seven festivals on which all citizens are off; in article 3, four commemorative days that give part of the population time off (Women's Day, Youth Day, Children's Day, the Army's founding anniversary); and in article 5, nine commemorative days that expressly carry no time off — 7 February, 30 May, 7 July, 3 September, 18 September, Teachers' Day, Nurses' Day, Journalists' Day and Arbor Day. None of them belongs to this category. Article 4 of the same instrument leaves the festivals customary to ethnic minorities to the local governments of the areas where they live, to be fixed according to each group's own customs. At sub-national level one related day does exist: according to material published on the website of the Tibet Autonomous Region government, on 19 January 2009 the second session of the ninth Tibet Autonomous Regional People's Congress voted to adopt a Decision on Establishing the Serfs' Emancipation Day of Tibet, setting 28 March each year as that commemorative day. It was created by the regional people's congress and does not appear on the State Council's national list.
What is this topic?
The two largest slaveholding societies in the Americas both waited until the 2020s to put abolition on the national holiday calendar — the United States in 2021, Brazil in 2023 — more than a century and a half after slavery ended in law.
Both arrived the same way, from below: Texas made 19 June a state holiday in 1980, and Brazil's 20 November passed through the school calendar and then a commemorative-date statute before it became a holiday.
India has no abolition holiday; the closest date, Ambedkar Jayanti on 14 April, is not even on the central government's annual holiday list and is granted each year by a separate order.
Taiwan names 21 March in statute and expressly gives no day off, Japan has the law but no date, and neither Indonesia's nor China's national holiday list contains anything of the kind.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.