What actually shuts down, and for how long
Most Foshan factories close for one to three weeks around Chinese New Year, with many workers returning to their home provinces and not coming back to full staffing immediately after the official holiday ends — the practical shutdown often runs longer than the calendar holiday itself.
The weeks before are just as disrupted as the holiday itself
Factories typically try to clear as much production as possible before the shutdown, which means the four to six weeks leading up to it are their busiest and most backlogged period — a bad time to expect a fast turnaround on a new order.
Why the weeks after are slower than expected
Many factories return to only partial staffing in the first two to three weeks after the holiday, as workers trickle back from their home provinces — production commitments made for immediately after the new year should build in extra buffer.
A practical planning rule
For any order needed in the January–March window, placing it and confirming production slots by early November gives enough runway to clear the pre-holiday rush, survive the shutdown, and still land before the deadline.
Beyond the factory: what else slows down
The factory shutdown is the visible disruption, but it is not the only one. Inland trucking capacity tightens in the days before the holiday and again afterwards as drivers return. Consolidation warehouses run reduced staffing. Freight forwarders and customs brokers in China are thinner on the ground, so documentation queries take longer to answer at exactly the point when they must be answered.
Port operations themselves largely continue, which creates a misleading impression. The container terminal is working; the people who need to issue a certificate, correct an invoice or release a booking are not. Plan for the administrative chain to be the constraint rather than the physical one.
Planning a sourcing trip around the holiday
Visiting Foshan during the shutdown is close to pointless — showrooms may be open, but production managers and factory decision-makers generally are not. The best window for a buying trip is late spring through early autumn, when factories are running normally and lead times are close to their baseline.
If a trip must fall near the holiday, aim for before rather than after: the pre-holiday period is genuinely busy, but factories are motivated to close deals and capacity is still available. The weeks immediately following the holiday are the worst of both worlds, with limited staffing and a backlog to clear before anything new starts.
Getting dates into the contract
Where an order straddles the holiday, the delivery date should be agreed in writing with the shutdown explicitly accounted for — not left as an assumption that both sides have allowed for it. A verbal commitment that production will continue "as normal" through January is worth very little if the workshop empties in the second week of February.
It also helps to agree what happens if the date is missed. A factory that knows a slipped schedule carries a consequence plans differently from one that expects to resolve it in conversation. That is true of any order, but it matters most for the ones that fall across the one period of the year when you cannot recover the time.