Travel just a memory for Chinese staying home for the National Day holiday

This year’s October ‘golden week’ is likely to lose its lustre, with the number of train trips expected to be the lowest since the pandemic began

Covid-19 controls have been tightened ahead of the break and the party congress in Beijing, and people have been urged not to leave their cities

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Travellers at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station on Friday, ahead of the National Day “golden week” holiday. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 8:00am, 1 Oct 2022

For years, the National Day holiday has given tourism and spending a boost in China, but this year’s “golden week” is likely to lose its lustre as many people stay home.

Covid-19 controls have been tightened ahead of the break – from October 1 to 7 – and a key political gathering in Beijing. And authorities are expecting the lowest number of train trips to be made in the holiday period since the pandemic began – 68.5 million from September 28 to October 8.

Trains are the most popular way to travel medium and long distances in mainland China. Some 110 million train trips were taken during last year’s National Day holiday, down from 120 million the previous year, according to the Ministry of Railways. In 2019, before the pandemic, that number was 138 million.

Passengers crowd the Zhengzhou East Railway Station in Henan a day before the week-long national holiday begins. Photo: AFP

Li Yan, 35, who works in the financial sector in Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu province, said she missed the days before Covid, when she could travel freely.

“At first I could still travel to other provinces with a face mask on, then it was just within the province. For this year’s holiday the ‘advice’ is to stay in my city,” Li said. “It’s quite a contrast to the pre-Covid days when I was spending the holiday sipping coffee in Paris or admiring maple trees in Kyodo.”

China closed its borders in the spring of 2020 in a bid to stop the spread of the coronavirus. And as the situation eased within China, hundreds of millions of tourists – unable to travel abroad – flocked to hotspots across the mainland during the National Day holiday that year, contributing to the country’s economic recovery.

Tourism revenue in the holiday period was still down by 30 per cent from the previous year, but retail sales went up by 5 per cent, suggesting consumer confidence had rebounded after the country appeared to have contained the virus through measures like mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine.

By the end of 2020, China was the only major economy in the world to report positive GDP growth – initially reported as 2.3 per cent for 2020 but later revised down to 2.2 per cent.