They went for the luxurious caress of a French leather handbag (or several), the cathartic splash of a high-tech Japanese toilet’s bidet feature or the perfect selfie-stick pose in front of Bilbo Baggins’ round Hobbit door, tucked into the lush hills of New Zealand.
More than 5 million Chinese were estimated to have traveled abroad over the Lunar New Year holiday that ended on Wednesday, a 10 percent increase over the year before and the first time Chinese tourists bound for foreign lands outnumbered those vacationing domestically, Xinhua news agency reported.
Flush with cash and wanderlust, more than 60 percent of Chinese who chose to travel during the holiday — eschewing the traditions of gathering at home with relatives to eat dumplings and watch the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda-drenched Spring Festival Gala — preferred to get their passports stamped, surf uncensored Internet sites and fill their suitcases with souvenirs.
Photo: AFP
Li Zhao, 24, who works for a candy company in Beijing, took her family to Bali, Indonesia, for their first overseas vacation together. On the island they went white-water rafting, rode elephants and watched dolphins — along with masses of other Chinese.
“Almost all of the big tour buses I saw there had Chinese characters on them,” she said.
For all their numbers, the Chinese tourists who went abroad for the holiday make up a very small minority of the country’s population, about one out of every 270 people. For comparison, the total number of Americans who travel abroad in an average month is about the same — about 5.6 million, according to the US Department of Commerce — but they represent about 1 out of every 56 US residents.
Still, like a week-long version of Black Friday in the US, the Lunar New Year holiday in China is increasingly known for astounding displays of conspicuous consumption.
The China Tourism Academy estimated that Chinese tourists shelled out more than 140 billion yuan (US$22 billion) during the holiday, Xinhua reported.
The weakening yen and euro provided an additional lure to Chinese shoppers.
In Tokyo, Chinese tourists cleaned out shelves of mechanized toilet seats, digital cameras and rice cookers, according to the People’s Daily. On Sunday, a 27-year-old Chinese woman spent more than US$300,000 on clothes, jewelry, cosmetics and a US$45,000 Cartier watch at a South Korean mall, the Chosun Ilbo reported.
An online Chinese shopping guide for Thailand recommended buying crocodile leather goods, snake medicine and visiting a tailor shop in the Holiday Inn Bangkok that supposedly helped outfit foreign leaders with suits and shirts for a diplomatic summit meeting.
While complaints of Chinese manners — or a lack thereof — are a chronic source of embarrassment in China, occasionally there are more serious consequences. In New Zealand, some police officers attributed a recent spike in fatal car crashes and reckless driving incidents to the 40,000 Chinese tourists who flocked to the country over the holiday, according to the Press newspaper.
On Monday, a driver from Beijing with a baby on board was filmed repeatedly crossing into oncoming traffic before a fellow motorist confiscated his rental car keys.
A few days earlier, a Chinese tourist was charged with causing the death of a five-year-old New Zealand girl after his car crossed the median and collided with an oncoming vehicle.
In court, “the man showed no emotion during the hearing,” Hong Kong’s Standard newspaper reported.
Yet for most of the world’s largest group of outbound travelers, vacations pass without a hitch. Last year, Chinese took more than 100 million trips abroad, according to China’s State Tourism Administration (US residents made 68 million).
Over the Lunar New Year holiday, the most popular destinations were South Korea, Thailand and, perhaps surprisingly, Japan.
Despite a long-standing territorial dispute with Japan inflamed by Beijing’s accusations that Tokyo must repent for crimes committed during World War II, about 2.4 million Chinese visited the country last year, an 83 percent increase from the year before, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.
Not all Chinese citizens were thrilled about their compatriots fraternizing with China’s historic enemy. After word spread of the Chinese shopping spree for Japanese toilets, some irate Chinese took to social media to vent.
“The Japanese are raking in Chinese tourists’ money to manufacture weapons,” wrote one microblogger, Xue Ziyu. “I wonder if these shoppers will sit comfortably on their toilet.”
Still, some Japanese industries do not mind losing out on the influx of Chinese visitors.
Along the side streets of Tokyo’s red-light district of Yoshiwara, the anterooms of bathhouses with names like Satin Doll, Candy Girl and Cute were filled with men’s loafers arranged neatly in one corner and strappy high-heels in another, evidence that their owners were mutually occupied elsewhere.
“Come inside, the girls are happy to play,” a tout said.
However, Chinese men are no longer welcome in certain Yoshiwara establishments following a spate of incidents in which Chinese tourists behaved roughly with the masseuses, posted clandestine photos of them online or simply refused to pay for erotic services rendered.
“More and more Chinese are coming, but they get turned away, because we know they make trouble,” the tout said.
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