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The Chinese for ages have greeted each other with the opening phrase: Have you eaten?

Today, it is: "Where have you been for fun lately?"

The 114 legal holidays a year, including three week-long holidays, have enabled more Chinese to travel and pursue leisure activities.

Chen Jun, a 38-year-old businessman from East China's Jiangsu Province, bought a car in 2004. Since then, he has spent every week-long holiday with his wife and young daughter driving to various attractions and resorts.

"The farthest place we visited was Tibet during the National Day holiday last year," he said, adding that traveling has now become a passion and a respite from daily pressures.

Chen is not alone. Statistics show that domestic tourism is growing each year. Last year the number of people traveling outnumbered the total population for the first time.

About 818 million out of 1,394 million domestic trips last year were made by rural dwellers, outnumbering urban residents, and accounting for 86.4 percent of the total rural population.

The rest 576 million trips were made by urban residents, or 156.7 percent of the urban population, which means many may have traveled at least twice.

The average expenditure of domestic travelers per capita was 447 yuan ($58).

"It means travel has now become a popular consumption in China," said Li Zhiran, spokesman of China National Tourism Administration.

The nature of tourism is also changing.

"Traditional sightseeing is giving way to travel for the purpose of leisure. Tourist resorts will be the hot spots during this Golden Week," Li said.

Song Rui, a tourism scholar with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told China Daily more people are seeking leisure activities to ease the pressures of daily life.

"People are now pursuing quality travel not just sightseeing, and that demand is being met by the variety of tourism products on the market," she said.

The administration is also encouraging travel services to design more products, and tourist resorts to upgrade service standards.

China adopted a five-day holiday week in May 1995. It then adopted the Golden Week holiday system on October 1, 1999, which enabled the people to have 114 legal festivals and holidays a year, "the level of a developed country", as Song described it.

"This was unimaginable before. Today, people can spend more days at home to relax," said Zhou Huinan, a retired engineer.

"In the past, people did not even have time to travel back home to visit their relatives. But now we enjoy a high-quality lifestyle, which is equally important as working," he said.

However, experts point out rural folk still do not enjoy as much leisure time as their urban counterparts. The average expenditure per capita for a rural tourist is only 222 yuan ($28), while that for an urban one is 766 yuan ($99).

(China Daily 05/03/2007 page3) 

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