China analysts

Throughout the week, Chinese social media sites were abuzz

with reports from disgruntled tourists complaining about

lengthy queues, chronic overcrowding, and awful traffic. One

popular post on Weibo, China‘s top social network, featured

pictures of tourists stuck in highway traffic jams getting

out of their cars to play tennis or host picnics on the road.

Another showed pictures of the beaches in the island province

of Hainan covered in a thick blanket of tourist-created

trash. A third told of a camel that dropped dead of

exhaustion after ferrying tourists through the Gobi desert in

the northwestern town of Dunhuang.

(PHOTOS: Chinese Tourists in North Korea)

While travelers groaned, though, economists must have been

grinning. For months, China-watchers have been worrying about

the prospect of a ‘hard-landing’ for the Chinese economy.

China’s economic planners have been working to shift China’

s economy away from reliance on government-funded

infrastructure spending and low-value manufacturing and

toward a more consumer-driven model of growth. Thus far,

their efforts have had limited success, with consumers

largely choosing to hold onto their cash rather than fritter

it away on discretionary spending. Meanwhile, demand for

Chinese-made products from Europe and the US continues to

lag, and China analysts are not convinced that the domestic

consumers are ready to replace the flagging low-end

manufacturing sector. Could the crowds signal that better

times are coming?

Some are cautiously optimistic. Travelers pumped close to $35

billion into the domestic economy during the 7-day Golden

Week period at the start of October, an increase of 45%

compared to the same period last year. “People who believe

China is mired in a crisis, with slumping growth and falling

stock prices, could be shocked by this strong tourism data,”

Ting Lu, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote

in a recent report.  The promising tourism data, he says,

indicates that consumption spending is increasingly shifting

towards leisure pursuits.

(MORE: The Holiday Hustle: Chinese Travelers Are Tired of

Getting Gouged)

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