Coronavirus and floods destroy China’s Dragon Boat Festival holiday plans
- Tourism revenues down nearly 70 per cent with only half of last year’s number of trips taken during three-day break
- New wave of infections in Beijing, severe flooding in southern provinces and sluggish income growth combine to keep people at home
Chinese tourists made 48.8 million trips during the holiday, which ended on Saturday, only half the number recorded a year earlier. As a result, tourism revenue plunged by 69 per cent to 12.3 billion yuan (US$1.7 billion), according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The sluggish figures were due to the “dual challenges from the pandemic and floods”, the ministry said on Saturday. In a bid to boost consumer confidence, the ministry avoided words suggesting declines. Instead, it said tourism was in the process of crawling back to a normal level.
Virtual lockdown: Beijingers mark Dragon Boat Festival online amid travel bans
The holiday commemorates the death of Qu Yuan, a patriotic poet and politician who lived during the Warring States period around 2,300 years ago. China made it a statutory holiday in 2007 to promote Chinese culture and boost consumption.
Tourism demand this year was dampened by social distancing measures, especially China’s requirement that all tourist destinations should run at no more than 30 per cent of their capacity, according to the ministry.
Based on hotel and airline ticket booking figures, China’s largest online travel services provider Ctrip said the domestic tourism market had been recovering since March after a slump in February when the central Chinese city of Wuhan was in lockdown and the coronavirus pandemic was at its height.
However, the pace of growth in June slowed from the previous months, Ctrip said in a report released on Saturday.
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Deadly floods and torrential rain in China affect over 8.5 million people
As part of the control measures against the coronavirus, anyone who wants to leave Beijing must first have a nucleic acid test. The result is valid for seven days. Many local governments have extra requirements on people from Beijing, such as a period of quarantine, although China’s health authorities have suggested that additional measures are unnecessary.
Zhou Yijie, a programmer in Beijing, said he cancelled his travel plans to the eastern province of Anhui because he wanted to “avoid trouble”.
“When I thought about the procedure – from making a test appointment to get tested and waiting for the test result for days and possible mistreatment at the destination – I felt anxious,” he said. “In the end, I decided to just stay at home, going nowhere, and sleep 10 hours a day.”
Meanwhile, China is also experiencing an unusually intense flood season in southern China, with rainstorm alerts issued for 26 consecutive days in June. Weeks of torrential rain and heavy flooding have affected 14 million people across the country, including in Guangxi, Guizhou, Guangdong, Hunan and Jiangxi.
After coronavirus, flooding hits southern China with 14 million affected
Economists Larry Hu and Ji Xinyu at Macquarie Capital said slower income growth and social distancing were behind the country’s sluggish consumption recovery. While social distancing will phase out when the pandemic was brought under control, slower income growth was expected to weigh on people’s tourism spending and other consumption in the longer term.
“Offline services have been hit extremely hard by Covid-19, as consumers are shunning spending on human interaction,” they wrote in a research note. “The recovery so far has been soft, especially for those which are contact-intensive or require cross-region travel.”
Urban household disposable income only grew 0.5 per cent year on year in the first quarter, the lowest growth since 2003 when the data was first made available.
