The Lunar New Year is a big deal for tourism in China. This year, the festival saw revenues of 423.3 billion yuan (around $61.55 billion US), which is a 15.9-percent increase over last year. That amounts to around 344 million domestic trips, as people travel the country to visit family or go to the festival somewhere else. It was slightly less (in scale) than the previous year, which saw a 16.3-percent increase. There were also about 6.15 million Chinese tourists who traveled internationally during the period, a 7-percent increase according to the China National Tourism Administration.
Tourism figures like these are useful to the Chinese government and to those observing the country for two reasons. For one, it indicates the strength of the country’s growing service economy. China has been working on moving from a production and manufacturing basis to a more consumer driven economy, from just making merchandise for other countries to actually selling those products in-country.
It also helps to gauge consumer spending, because tourism is a very useful metric for these figures. Domestic tourism brought in 3.9 trillion yuan in 2016, and the nation wants that up to about 7 trillion by 2020. Tourism is consumer spending, and it can significantly boost economies in places where tourists go, especially in the service sector and retail.
Over the Lunar New Year festival week, retail and catering did about 840 billion yuan in business, an 11.4-percent increase over 2016. That’s not all from tourism, of course, as people who stay home for the Lunar New Year go shopping and have parties too, but it does indicate the health of those parts of the economy.
The Lunar New Year festival is a time when people tend to spend in large numbers, and because of this, it can work like the Christmas season in the U.S. to indicate general economic strength.