Chinese colleges are giving students a week off to 'fall in love' as the country struggles to keep its birth rate up
Nine colleges in China say they're giving students a week off to "go fall in love" in April.
They've been asked to keep travel diaries, film videos of their trips, and write growth reports.
The new theme for these students' spring break comes as China faces plummeting birth and marriage rates.
Nine vocational colleges in China want their students to go forth and find love during a weeklong spring break in April.
The schools, run by the Fan Mei Education Group, announced on March 23 that they are going on a break from April 1 to 7, and tasked students with enjoying themselves.
"The school implements the spring break system in the hope that students can learn to love nature, love life, and enjoy love," said Liang Guohui, deputy dean of the Mianyang Aviation Vocational College, in a statement.
"Walk out of campus, get in touch with nature, and with your heart feel the beauty of spring," the school said in its statement.
The participating colleges are all vocational schools for jobs in the aviation industry, such as pilots, flight attendants, air traffic controllers, and airport security staff.
The schools have been giving students and teachers a week off in the spring since 2019. But this year's theme, "enjoy the blossoms, go fall in love," places a special emphasis on romance.
The announcement comes amid a push in China to bolster rapidly declining birth and marriage rates. Local companies, provinces, and townships have been experimenting with ways to get people to tie the knot, like offering 30 days of "marriage leave" or launching campaigns asking city women to date rural older bachelors.
Liu Ping, deputy dean of Sichuan Southwest Aviation Vocational College, told China News Network that the school started its spring break program in response to feedback from students, who asked for a fixed time to learn outside of campus, make new friends, and "experience the beauty of love."
Students are still assigned homework, but their tasks are to write travel diaries, pen reports on their own growth, make handicrafts, or film videos of their travels, reported China Youth Daily, the newspaper of the Communist Party's youth league.
"We've decided to go holidaying to Lijiang for four or five days, then use the last two days to prepare for class," Yang Hanyue, a student at the college, told China News Network.
Liu Yingzhi, another student, told the outlet she was going to visit her grandparents and take them to see flowers, and that she was given a homework assignment to take photos of the elderly couple.
Some of the colleges' announcements went viral on Weibo, or China's version of Twitter. Sichuan Southwest Aviation Vocational College's notice received nearly 130 million views in the two days after it was posted, per data seen by Insider.
"Can this not be popularized for the rest of the country?" one user wrote in a top comment.
"Sichuan is really strong at boosting the fertility rate!" another person on Weibo wrote.
The week-long spring break is an expansion of China's one-day national holiday for tomb sweeping day — also known as the Qingming Festival — on Wednesday, April 5.
There's a catch: The colleges are holding make-up classes on weekends to make up for lost time. Their goal, the schools said, is to give students and teachers a "concentrated" time to rest.
It's a common practice in China, where some companies enforce blocks of vacations to give employees more time to travel with their families. Workers, in turn, make up for the days they've spent out of the office by reporting for work on the weekends.
Representatives for the Fan Mei Education Group did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
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