How does Taiwan mark Emancipation Days?
民族平等紀念日
- Local date
- March 21, 2027
Taiwan has no abolition anniversary; the closest date on this axis is 21 March, the Memorial Day for Ethnic Equality. The Act on Commemorative Days and Holidays lists it as the fifth of twenty commemorative days in article 3, with the Memorial Day for the Lifting of Martial Law on 15 July as the ninth. Neither carries a day off: article 4 restricts the commemorative days that give one day's holiday to six — Founding Day of the Republic of China, Peace Memorial Day, Confucius's Birthday, National Day, Retrocession and Guningtou Victory Day, and Constitution Day — and states that all the rest "shall not be holidays". What a commemorative day does require is set out in article 7: agencies shall fly the national flag, and the remaining commemorative days "may hold commemorative activities according to their nature" — may, not shall. 21 March is also the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which the National Human Rights Commission marks each year.
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.