China’s Covid lockdowns snuff out ‘on-a-whim’ travel, leaving domestic tourism in tatters

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The Mid-Autumn Festival brought more bad news for the travel sector, and the coming Golden Week period will not help either, experts say

With Beijing enforcing zero-Covid policy zealously in the run-up to October’s 20th Party Congress, travel companies and would-be travellers see no relief in sight

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Yaling Jiang

Published: 10:00am, 17 Sep 2022Updated: 10:09am, 17 Sep 2022

Angela Lee may stay home in Shenzhen when China’s weeklong National Day holiday comes around in October, just as she did during last week’s Mid-Autumn Festival, because the country’s draconian zero-Covid controls have put her off travelling.

Her last trip – an August visit with her boyfriend to Hainan, an idyllic island with the reputation as China’s Hawaii – ended in a mad dash for the airport, only to be plucked from the departure gate straight into quarantine at a government-assigned hotel, after local authorities locked down several cities across the island province amid a resurgent Covid-19 outbreak.

“The days of travelling on a whim are long gone,” said Lee in an interview from Shenzhen. The couple’s forced quarantine was free, but it was an “emotional roller coaster ride” they would rather not repeat, she said.

Lee, one of the 80,000 tourists who found themselves stuck last month in Hainan’s Sanya resort city, is the human face of a tourism industry that is lying in tatters. The city is favoured by Russian tourists, especially during the northern hemisphere’s winter months, so much so that street signs often feature the Cyrillic script.

Angela Lee and her boyfriend on a transit bus after completing their mandatory hotel quarantine in Hainan, on August 14, 2022. Photo: Angela Lee

Tourism receipts shrank 22.8 per cent from a year ago to 28.7 billion yuan (US$4.1 billion) during last week’s Mid-Autumn Festival, traditionally a period for travelling and family gatherings, according to data from China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The plunge prompted Premier Li Keqiang to call for policies to drive up domestic consumption to keep the economy growing.

Li has reason for concern. Tourism contributed 11 per cent of China’s economic activity before the pandemic broke out in 2019, but is now powerless to sustain a sputtering economy that is expanding at its slowest annual pace since records began in 1992. An estimated 65 million people across 33 cities – including Hainan, Tibet and in Xinjiang – are in some form of lockdown, according to a September 4 report by Caixin.