Everything, everywhere, all at once with ‘military-style travel’ – how Gen Z are making the most of their freedom after China’s Covid lockdowns

What can you get done in 48 hours in Guangzhou? For one university student in China, it is taking in 20 scenic spots and visiting a host of foodie attractions

This is ‘military-style travel’ – a new travel trend for the country’s Gen Z requiring rigorous planning to see multiple places, with very little room for error

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A traveller in front of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, in China. Chinese Gen Z seeing places like this as quickly and briefly as possible thanks to “military-style travel”. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:15pm, 21 Apr 2023Updated: 1:09pm, 22 Apr 2023

One recent Sunday, Ubon Yu – a university student in Changsha, in China’s Hunan province – rushed to a railway station and hopped on the 12.30pm train to Guangzhou in neighbouring Guangdong province.

He checked his travel notes on his phone, and made some last-minute changes to his two-day schedule.

“I wanted to check in at all the attractions and try the food in Guangzhou within a limited amount of time,” the 22-year-old recalls. He calculated that, to include all of the culinary attractions he had marked, he could probably squeeze 20 scenic spots into his 48-hour stay in the city. There was very little room for error.

Welcome to a new way of travelling in China, popular among university students, that treats sightseeing as a type of challenge.

Ubon Yu’s travel strategy that he made before going to Guangzhou. Photo: Ubon Yu

The objective is to visit as many tourist hotspots as possible, and often within a short amount of time. As a result, they need to plan their itineraries with military precision. Chinese media have already coined a term for this latest trend: “military-style travel.”

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