CHINA / Do You Know
How Chinese & foreigners spend May Day?
(chinanews.cn)
Updated: 2006-04-30 10:04
China's official statistics show that ever since the first golden week in
1999, China's tourism revenue of 14 golden weeks in seven years totaled
429.2 billion RMB (US$52.9 billion), with the number of Chinese tourists
hitting 1.07 billion. Based on the current growing pace, China will
become the world's largest tourist destination and the fourth tourist
exporter by 2020. The proportion of tourism revenue to China's GDP will
also rise from 5.44% in 2002 to 8% in 2010. One can see the great power
of China's golden week tourism economy from these figures.
For most car owners in China, a driving tour with family members during
the May Day holiday golden week is their first choice. Relevant data show
that among tourists from big and medium-size cities, approximately 30%
prefer driving their own cars on a tour. In Beijing, 53% of tourists
choose to travel by their own vehicles.
For most Chinese farmers, however, traveling in holidays remains a luxury
nowadays. During golden weeks, they are able to free themselves from
heavy work, having dinner and going shopping with friends and relatives,
and buying some cheap clothes. Ms Liao from Sichuan Province is now the
nurse of a three-year-old boy of a Swedish couple in Beijing. She hopes
her Swedish employers would go back Sweden to spend their holidays during
this May 1 golden week, so that she could return to her hometown in
Sichuan. She has not been home for years due to overly high traveling
expenses.
As an increasingly large number of foreigners are working and living in
China, some of them also travel during China's golden weeks, and some
Europeans working in China complain that the holidays are not enough. A
French lady from the France Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai indicated
that since she arrived in China, she could only have long holidays during
the Spring Festival, May Day holiday and National Day holiday like
ordinary Chinese. She also has ten extra days of annual leave, while she
usually misses them because of insufficient workforce. She used to have
eight-week holidays in France, hence she complained that she could go
nowhere as a seven-day leave was really too short.
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