[Though tourists may gripe about the crowds,
they are a welcome sight for Communist Party leaders who say that China must
move to a more consumer-driven economy. The country’s economic growth has been
fueled for many years by infrastructure investment, which officials say is
economically and environmentally unsustainable.]
By Edward Wong
 |
|
A record number of
Chinese have hit the road this week for the National Day holiday,
including these tourists
crossing a bridge at West Lake in Hangzhou,
Zhejiang Province. Credit
Reuters
|
BEIJING
— If there is ever a time
when one truly understands what it feels like to live alongside 1.4 billion
people in the world’s most populous nation, it is the annual Golden Week
holiday in China.
The holiday always begins on Oct. 1, the
celebration of the Communist founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. And
this year, the crowds have gotten even more epic in scale, with hordes of
travelers taking to the highways, the rails and the air. (Also, of course, to
tourist camels in the Gobi, horses on the Tibetan Plateau and boats on the
Yangtze River.)
People’s Daily, the Communist Party
newspaper, said 589 million people were expected to travel this week — almost
twice the population of the United States.
Though tourists may gripe about the crowds,
they are a welcome sight for Communist Party leaders who say that China must
move to a more consumer-driven economy. The country’s economic growth has been
fueled for many years by infrastructure investment, which officials say is
economically and environmentally unsustainable.
But “sustainable” means different things to
different people. Photographs of miles-long traffic jams on highways and oceans
of people at the country’s top attractions are circulating online this week.
On Tuesday, the official Twitter account of
People’s Daily posted one such photo from the Forbidden City, in Beijing. It
said the palace had sold 20,000 tickets within two hours on Sunday, or 166
tickets a minute.
The newspaper also pointed out the miseries
of being on the road. Early Tuesday, it reported via Facebook (which, like
Twitter, is blocked in China) that 500 people had become stuck on Mount Hua
overnight after heavy winds forced a cable car to stop operating.
One photograph online showed fog and mist
enveloping the mountain, and others showed many elderly tourists and women and
children gathered in a cave near the mountaintop cable car station. Mount Hua,
or Huashan in Mandarin, is a sacred Taoist mountain in Shaanxi Province that is
about 7,067 feet tall. The West Peak, where the cable car station is, has an
altitude of 6,850 feet.
China Central Television, the main state
television network, reported on Monday that 14.4 million people traveled by
train on Saturday, the first day of the holiday week, an increase of 15 percent
over the same time last year. More than 500 additional trains were put into
service, it said.
Air passengers that day numbered 960,000, a
6.4 percent increase over 2015.
Driving was also popular because governments
do not collect tolls on roads during this time, “which led to the inevitable
gridlock on the country’s highways,” the television network said. The same
report said traffic on a six-mile stretch of road in Shanghai ground to a halt.
Police officers were using drones to help
monitor traffic conditions during the holiday, according to Xinhua, the state
news agency. It quoted the Ministry of Public Security as saying that 214,000
officers were on the roads on Saturday. There were 55,000 cases of speeding
violations, 1,100 cases of drunken driving and 3,100 cases of the illegal use
of emergency lanes, the report said.
A photograph in a slide show on the website
of Xinhua showed cheek-by-jowl crowds beneath an outdoor archway at the Sun Yat-sen
Mausoleum in Nanjing.
Domestic tourism has been on the rise in
China for years, with the Golden Week period generating more revenue for most
tourism-related businesses than any other week of the year.
In 2015, Chinese tourists made four billion
domestic trips, twice as many as in 2010, according to government data. That
number is also much more than the 122 million trips they made abroad last year.
Beijing has been quiet outside of the most
popular tourist attractions like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Temple
of Heaven and the Summer Palace. On streets that are usually clogged on
workdays, there are few cars. Many restaurants are closed.
One resident, Mu Shuhua, said he was staying
in town this week. Outside it, he said, “there are too many people traveling.”
Follow Edward Wong on Twitter @comradewong.
