Chinese mainland tourism destinations stand to gain from a new awareness of their charms spurred by pandemic-altered traveling habits. But they need help being discovered. Luo Weiteng reports.

China’s big-spending vacationers have been plying the globe for decades to experience its cultural and entertainment riches. During a bruising 2020, however, pandemic-enforced quarantines, entry bans and other restrictions kept some 600 million tourists — roughly 40 percent of the country’s population — at home.

While international travel lies knocked out by the pandemic, by contrast Chinese mainland tourism industry stands tall and fighting.

First came self-driven sojourns to nearby destinations. Next it was interprovincial travel which began in mid-July. The domestic tourism industry essentially made a comeback during the traditional weeklong National Day holiday in October, which coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival and stretched to eight days.

During the period, domestic sightseers made 637 million visits to tourist attractions across the mainland, data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism show, or 79 percent of volume for the same period in 2019.

Revenue for the period reached 466.56 billion yuan (US$72.2 billion), 70 percent of the previous year’s take.

The figures are at the tip of an up-trending graph that started with 115 million trips taken during the Labor Day break in May and 43 million trips during the Qingming holiday in April.

Though a winter spike in coronavirus infections has rekindled public concern and triggered a fresh bout of calls to avoid non-essential travel during holidays — including the important Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival — that starts next week, there is no question that the nation’s US$1.5 trillion domestic tourism market has had its future reshaped by the unprecedented public health crisis.

Potential needs unlocking

The challenge for some culturally rich yet less-known destinations, say industry experts, lies in marketing their unique resources in an age of instant, ubiquitous information that puts the lie to the ancient idiom “Good wine needs no bush”, meaning something of quality need not be advertised.

China’s remote northwestern region, in particular, has become one of the go-to destinations. Gansu province alone recorded approximately 15.95 million tourist visits from Oct 1 to 8, raking in 9.26 billion yuan of tourism revenue.

Guan Yueheng, a marketer based in Shanghai, would usually travel abroad to keep away from the crowds, long queues and pricey accommodation in domestic tourist attractions during public holidays. This year, she said, she headed to the northwestern region, only to discover that its awe-inspiring scenery and magnificent landscape are “second to none and seriously underrated”.

Likewise, Zhang Ran, an in-house counsel at a Beijing-based e-commerce company, visited Shanxi province and said he was impressed by its well-preserved treasures of ancient Chinese architecture.

“Previously, millions of Chinese visitors were attracted to Japan, in our quest to get a so-called taste of the Tang dynasty,” Zhang said. “Yet, it turns out that all of the four remaining wooden structures preserved from the Tang dynasty in China are found in Shanxi, with more than 18,000 complex remains identified and scattered throughout the province,” Zhang said. “Shanxi deserves to be known by more people.”

While the domestic tourism industry is betting big on a bounce back in the post-pandemic era, those destinations lack the supporting infrastructure and services necessary to unlock their potential, said Zhou Mingqi, chief analyst at Jingjian Thinktank, a tourism marketing consulting company. The destinations need to expand and improve transportation, accommodation, scenic spot planning and management, Zhou said.

Tourism contributed more than 9 percent to the mainland’s economy in 2019, and stands as a cornerstone of the government’s long-term goal to create a consumption-driven economy.

The domestic tourism industry, expected to be worth 6 percent of the mainland’s economic output by the end of 2020, can be a bright spot in the “dual circulation” development model that is central to the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), said Liu Zhengshan, deputy secretary-general of the China Research Society of Urban Development.

The model combines tapping the potential of China’s massive domestic market and indigenous innovation to fuel growth with international economic engagement.

Changing appetites and abundant concerns among the nation’s increasingly fickle and choosy travelers in the post-pandemic era also indicate that domestic tourism has to shift from a primary stage of natural beauty and the old mindset of “living on the providing of Heaven”, to a refined growth model powered by cultural values, said Song Rui, director of the Tourism Research Center under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Cultural tourism

The central government published a first-batch list of top-15 model cities and 60 pilot cities for cultural tourism in December.

Chengdu, which made the list of model cities, has long been known for its pioneering efforts on the cultural tourism front. The capital city of Sichuan province looks to launch the country’s first hanfu street during the Chinese New Year, riding a nationwide resurgence of interest in the ancient clothing of China’s Han ethnic group as the country’s young people take pride in their traditional culture.

To be sure, Chengdu has a fairly strong atmosphere of hanfu and is home to the nation’s first brick-and-mortar hanfu store. By the end of 2019, the city housed more than 100 offline hanfu shops, leading the pack in terms of the sheer number of hanfu outlets as well as the increase in the number of hanfu stores in a single year.

As Chengdu earns its reputation as a magnet for hanfu lovers and merchants along with other cities such as Beijing and Xi’an, the launch of a landmark hanfu street is just an act of following the natural course and may set a vivid example of cultural tourism for its counterparts to follow.

With the question of how to carve out a path for cultural tourism remaining open-ended — a matter of the right crop for the right land — there will inevitably be degrees of authenticity to the attractions that will appear as entrepreneurs see opportunities in the vast sea of potential.

Last year, a local property developer in Foshan, Guangdong province, built a 100-meter Japanese-themed shopping street.

Though the little-known street was merely a promotional stunt of a merchant and was reported to be temporarily closed due to copyright complaints, it is one of the few niche, human-made tourist attractions across the country, catering to some residents who are travel-starved or cannot afford to travel abroad by allowing them to pretend to be on vacation overseas.

“You may argue that tourist attractions of this kind do offer a different idea or a new route to cultural tourism, as the pandemic and travel restrictions indeed offer sort of business opportunities,” noted Zeng Tian, a blogger at Chinese travel review website Mafengwo. “But I prefer to regard them as a pure commercial act, aiming to attract some internet celebrities to take nice photos. This doesn’t have much to do with cultural tourism.”

After all, Foshan, listed as one of the 60 pilot cities for cultural tourism, could hardly make the street its calling card on the long, bumpy journey to polish its brand as a tourist mecca, Zeng added.

As the dizzying growth of the world’s second-largest economy has given birth to a new breed of “super consumers” who have now gone beyond mimicking the patterns of Western shoppers to being the trendsetters and innovators, domestic tourism players should equally step up the pace or go the extra mile, Zeng said.

Contact the writer at sophia@chinadailyhk.com