Chinese travelers looking for a relaxing Golden Week may have been disappointed. Record numbers set out for this month’s national holiday, creating a human traffic jam of epic proportions. Over the course of the eight-day break, some 740 million people were on the move. At Beijing’s Forbidden City on Oct. 2, visitor numbers hit a record high of 180, 000 tourists — the equivalent of 357 people entering the complex every minute. The following day, Hangzhou’s picturesque West Lake welcomed 900,000 visitors into an area less than twice the size of New York’s Central Park. Things got so uncomfortably packed that several sacred mountains, including Tai Shan, Wu Dang Shan and Lu Shan, were even forced to stop selling tickets altogether. Throughout the week, Chinese social-media sites were abuzz with reports from disgruntled tourists complaining about lengthy queues, chronic overcrowding and awful traffic. One popular post on Weibo, China’s top social network, featured pictures of tourists stuck in highway traffic jams getting out of their cars to play tennis or host picnics on the road. Another showed pictures of beaches in the island province of Hainan covered in a thick blanket of tourist-created trash. A third told of a camel that dropped dead of exhaustion after ferrying tourists through the Gobi Desert in the northwestern town of Dunhuang. (PHOTOS: Chinese Tourists in North Korea) While travelers groaned, though, economists must have been grinning. For months, China watchers have been worrying about the prospect of a hard landing for the Chinese economy. China’s planners have been working to shift the country’s economy away from reliance on government-funded infrastructure spending and low-value manufacturing toward a more consumer-driven model of growth. Thus far, their efforts have had limited success, with consumers largely choosing to hold on to their cash rather than fritter it away on discretionary spending. Meanwhile, demand for Chinese-made products from Europe and the U.S. continues to lag, and China analysts are not convinced that domestic consumers are ready to replace the flagging low-end manufacturing sector. Could the crowds signal that better times are coming? Some are cautiously … Continue reading China’s Economy: What the Tourist Boom Tells Us