(China&India Today Thursday 6 October 2016)
Golden Week hordes both a blessing and a curse
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 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 travellers taking to the highways, the rails, and the air.
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.
Although 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 fuelled for 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.
Driving is 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 are 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 slideshow 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, Mr Mu Shuhua, said he was staying in town this week. Outside it, he said, “There are too many people travelling.” THE NEW YORK TIMES