China closed a nine-day Spring Festival holiday—the longest in the country's history—with domestic tourism and spending hitting unprecedented levels. Over the break Chinese travellers made 5.96 billion domestic trips and spent 8,034.83 billion yuan, marking record highs for both visitor numbers and holiday expenditure and underscoring how deeply tourism has re-entered daily life.
The holiday showcased a shift in how Chinese people mark the Lunar New Year. A growing “reverse migration” trend saw younger urban residents bringing parents into big cities rather than returning to hometowns, while new consumption scenarios emerged that blended entertainment, heritage and convenience. Television exposure from the CCTV Spring Festival Gala translated into real-world footfall in places such as Yibin, which created themed check‑in spots and tourist shuttles to capitalise on the programme’s filming locations.
Cultural heritage was a particular focus of this year’s travel boom and was presented in more immersive forms than in the past. Intangible cultural heritage that used to be treated as a “checklist” for visitors has been repackaged into participatory experiences: from Cantonese martial dances and dragon fire events in the Greater Bay Area to Song‑era immersive fairs in Kaifeng and more than 1,800 New Year activities in Fuzhou. Museums and temple complexes—from the Palace Museum and Yonghe Temple in Beijing to provincial sites such as Wuhou Shrine in Sichuan—became must‑see holiday destinations as exhibitions and live performances married tradition to modern staging.
Modern tourism products and cross‑sector integration were on full display. Harbin converted its freeze into a lucrative asset, with foreign visitor numbers to its ice parks surging by orders of magnitude and ticket bookings spiking. Theme parks, film tie‑ins and experiential retail further broadened the tourism offer: Beijing’s Universal Resort extended New Year programming into multi‑sensory commercial experiences, while Shenzhen launched itineraries themed around recent popular films, turning subway stops and drone test sites into new photo locations.
The holiday also illustrated tourism’s role as a strategic economic sector and a lever for regional development. County towns with distinctive New Year customs—places such as Yixian in Huangshan and Yangshuo in Guilin—attracted heavy flows, and rural homestays in Chongqing combined upgraded accommodations with live folk rituals to deepen visitor engagement. Improved air links and denser route networks, including a cluster of feeder airports, made previously remote destinations like Wuyishan and Yongzhou far more accessible, while wellness and retirement travel showed strong demand at high‑end thermal resorts in Hunan.
Inbound tourism rebounded alongside domestic travel, aided by visa‑and‑transit facilitation such as 240‑hour transit exemptions. Foreign visitors used the holiday to sample both major urban hubs and niche cultural routes—watching folk parades in Datong, Tibetan New Year in Lhasa, and iron‑flower displays in Tengchong—while overseas influencers broadcast Chinese New Year scenes from places like Qianmen and Shanghai’s Yuyuan Garden, amplifying the holiday’s global reach.
The results are consequential for policymakers and businesses alike. The surge underlines tourism’s capacity to drive consumption, support jobs, and extend the reach of Chinese cultural soft power as the New Year increasingly becomes an international cultural event. It also raises familiar questions about sustainability, crowding and the uneven distribution of gains across regions: the industry’s next task will be to translate headline numbers into higher‑quality, year‑round tourism that balances growth with conservation and improves services in less developed destinations.