China’s tourism industry on way to full recovery
There have been strong signs since last year suggesting the tourism sector is on way to full recovery. Passenger trips within the country in 2023 increased to 4.89 billion, 93.3 percent more than the previous year, with domestic travelers spending 4.91 trillion yuan ($691.2 billion), up 140.3 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The huge domestic tourism market has been helping stabilize the global tourism industry as well as driving its growth. The number of tourists in China has been continuously increasing over the past four decades, with domestic passenger trips jumping from less than 500 million in the 1980s to more than 6 billion in 2019 at an average annual growth of about 10 percent.
China boasts both one of the world’s largest inbound tourism markets and a massive domestic tourist industry, which has been fast recovering after the COVID-19 pandemic. Official data show that during the eight-day Spring Festival holidays in February, 474 million domestic passenger trips were made, up 34.3 percent year-onyear, with the total domestic tourism spending increasing 47.3 percent year-on-year to about 632.69 billion yuan.
Also, about 119 million domestic passenger trips were made during the three-day Qingming Festival holiday earlier this month, an increase of 11.5 percent over the same period in 2019, with the domestic tourism industry’s revenue reaching 53.95 billion yuan, up 12.7 percent compared with the same period in 2019.
A large number of Chinese tourists have traveled or are willing to travel abroad this year, while other countries are learning from China’s innovative development model to make their tourism industries more resilient.
For example, barbecue in Zibo, Shandong province; malatang, a soup containing boiled meat and vegetables seasoned with mouthwatering, spicy scarlet chili oil, in Tianshui, Gansu province; and the ice-snow tourism festival in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, all have boosted domestic tourism. Their sound infrastructure, clean image and excellent public services have attracted even foreign internet influencers.
The huge domestic tourism market and supporting industries are China’s advantages, and they have accumulated rich experiences which the global tourism industry can reference. China’s tourism industry is treading the right path to optimize the tourism products, promoting the high-quality development of tourist destinations and developing new tourism formats.
China’s inbound and outbound tourism sectors both have performed well this year. During the Spring Festival holidays, Chinese people made 3.6 million outbound trips, close to the 2019 level. And while the number of outbound passenger trips could reach 130 million this year and inbound tourist footfalls could recover to 50 percent of the 2019 level, the inbound tourism markets of the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions and the Taiwan island province are expected to make fast recovery, according to the China Tourism Academy.
Therefore, it can be safely said that China’s tourism industry is on way to full recovery and is injecting new impetus into the global tourism industry.
China’s tourism industry shares with the rest of the world its development opportunities and strives to promote the development of a more open, more cooperative and higher-quality tourism market. For example, many tourist destinations across the world have benefited from Chinese tourists, as the swelling numbers of Chinese tourists in other countries have helped create more jobs and boost people-to-people exchanges.