Topic: Founders and National Leaders
Does China have Founders and National Leaders?
Not observed here
Mainland China has no statutory holiday or commemorative day named after an individual. In the State Council's Regulation on Public Holidays for National Annual Festivals and Memorial Days (State Council Order No. 795, revised 10 November 2024, in force 1 January 2025), Article 2 lists the seven holidays on which the whole population is off — New Year's Day, Spring Festival, Qingming, Labour Day, Dragon Boat, Mid-Autumn and National Day — and not one carries a person's name. Article 3 lists four partial holidays (Women's Day, Youth Day, Children's Day, Army Day), named for a group or an institution. Article 5 even enumerates the commemorative days that come with no time off — the February 7th, May 30th, July 7th, September 3rd and September 18th anniversaries, plus Teachers' Day, Nurses' Day, Journalists' Day and Arbor Day — and every one of them points at an event or an occupation. Commemorations for Sun Yat-sen's and Mao Zedong's birthdays do take place, but they sit outside this regulation, so institutionally they are not commemorative days and they do not touch the working calendar.
What is this topic?
In federal law the third Monday in February is still called Washington's Birthday. It is written that way in 5 U.S.C. §6103(a), the section that lists all eleven legal public holidays, and the Office of Personnel Management footnotes every annual holiday table to say that although states and businesses may use other names, its policy is to use the name in the statute. "Presidents' Day" is a state and retail habit that federal law never adopted. Taiwan went the other way and gave one man two dates: Article 3 of its Commemorative Days and Holidays Act lists both the birthday of the founding father (12 November) and the anniversary of his death (12 March), and Article 4 grants a day off for neither. Japan stripped every personal name out of its holiday law in 1948; none of today's sixteen national holidays carries an individual's name, and 29 April commemorates the Shōwa era rather than the emperor who reigned through it. Brazil's first republican decree in 1890 named Tiradentes outright, while the statute in force today says only "21 April".
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.