China’s state-run Global Times fired the metaphorical starting gun on the 2025 Spring Festival travel rush on Tuesday, an event frequently touted by China as the greatest annual movement of human populations in the world.
The Chinese government hopes this year’s dash to family reunions and vacation hotspots will also give a boost to dismal consumer spending.
“Overall, the Spring Festival travel rush is set to break records this year, with an estimated 9 billion trips expected to be made across the country during the 40-day period starting from Tuesday,” the Global Times reported.
“Data from various travel platforms also pointed to a travel peak in the upcoming eight-day Spring Festival holidays that start on January 28, which also speaks volumes for consumers’ confidence and spending power,” the report added.
The Spring Festival is China’s biggest holiday season and, like certain holidays in the Western world, it has grown well beyond its technical starting and ending dates. The festival nominally begins with Lunar New Year, which falls on January 29 this year, and ends 15 days later with the Lantern Festival, which will be held on February 12.
As the Global Times hinted, the Spring Festival is closer to a month-long holiday season today, with allowances made for travel to visit family members or enjoy resort destinations. The 40-day travel season is known as chunyun, which literally means “spring travel.”
The Spring Festival has also become known as a big shopping spree and movie season. All of these activities require spending money and the Chinese government is very much hoping consumers will open their wallets after years of disappointing domestic consumption following the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
There is a growing consensus among international observers — and Chinese citizens — that the regime in Beijing has been fudging its economic data to conceal the true decline of the economy since 2021. A prosperous travel and shopping season for Lunar New Year would go a long way toward helping the government allay those concerns. Chinese state media wants nothing more than to report record levels of consumer spending after the lanterns of the Lantern Festival are snuffed out.
On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun invited foreign tourists to join in the Spring Festival by partaking of new government policies that make travel to China easier and more attractive.
“With the Chinese New Year of the Snake half a month away, which is the first Spring Festival since the inscription of the festival on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list, we welcome foreign tourists to join China’s celebration of the Spring Festival, experience the joy of the Chinese New Year, feel the warmth of Chinese hospitality, and usher in an auspicious Year of the Snake,” Guo said.
Guo was referring to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and its representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The list, established in 2003, has grown into a very large compendium of “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills“ considered essential to cultures around the world.
UNESCO added, or “inscribed,” the Spring Festival on its list in December, making it the 44th artifact of Chinese culture to be so honored.
“China’s visa exemption policies have given a boost to inbound travel. Since the start of the year, ‘China Travel’ has kept trending, and a good number of foreign tourists spent their New Year’s Eve in China. Some travel agencies estimate that the number of travel bookings by foreign tourists for the Spring Festival period this year will increase by 203 percent year on year compared with 2024,” China’s state-run Xinhua news service gushed on Tuesday.
As it happens, 2024 was a pretty dismal year for tourism in China. There was a good deal of travel, but the travelers were not spending much money. Some in the travel and hospitality industries called it the worst year ever. The disappointment was even more pronounced because, as it is doing with Spring Festival 2025, the government had predicted a great year that would set cash registers to jingling.
Reuters on Tuesday spoke with Chinese travelers who hoped the Lunar New Year holiday would take their minds off the weak economy.
“If the economy does get better, I will have a better chance of finding a job, and I won’t have to go back to study for a master’s or doctoral degree. And if the economy improves, my father’s bonus won’t be halved. Everything else is fine,” a young woman traveling to a family reunion said.
Several young people said they were looking forward to getting away from overcrowded cities for peaceful visits with their families in rural communities, which is a lovely sentiment, but does not suggest they will dispose of a great deal of disposable income.
“Although joblessness data has shown some improvement in recent months, millions of college graduates have been pushed into accepting low-paying work or even subsisting on their parents’ pensions,” Reuters noted.
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