A summer of experiences: What China's holiday season is telling us

Editor's note: Deng Liuchun, a special commentator for CGTN, is an associate professor of economics at Duke Kunshan University. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of either CGTN or Duke Kunshan University.

On a wet afternoon last week, my family and I went to the Baijing Independent Comic Art Festival by Suzhou Creek in Shanghai. Young illustrators had set up inside a converted grain warehouse. Readers queued for signed sketches. Others leafed through zines or browsed tables of anime merchandise. A few foreign visitors moved through the crowd. No cultural bureau organized any of it, and five years ago it would not have taken this shape. Something in how Chinese households spend their money is changing.

Start with the holidays. Schools broke up by the end of June, and travel agencies had family packages ready. What sold wasn't just the standard tour. Museums stayed open into the evening, small venues put on shows, and towns that used to be waypoints found themselves hosting weekend crowds. 

Reviewing July, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) pointed to night markets, parent-child study trips and cooler-climate stays as the formats where demand showed up. The July price data shows how hard it pressed. Travel agency fees rose 7.2% from June, hotel rates 6.5%, air tickets 4.2% and car rentals 3.6%, together adding about 0.1 percentage point to the consumer price index. Over the first half of the year, people in China took over 3.46 billion domestic trips, 178 million more than last year, and spent 3.21 trillion yuan (about $476 billion).

Between January and June, 22.91 million foreign nationals entered China, up 20.4% from a year earlier. Among them, 17.82 million entered visa-free: 77.7% of the total, up 30.6%. July kept the pace. Beijing Capital International Airport and Beijing Daxing International Airport processed more than 600,000 foreign entries and exits that month alone, up 31%.

Ctrip, a leading travel platform in China, reports bookings from European travelers up 275% this summer, with Russians the largest European group, and Western European markets growing by about 150%. South Korea, Russia and Malaysia now lead the source markets, and the top 10 countries account for 62% of all foreign arrivals.

Monday's figures bear this out. Services retail sales grew 5% over the first seven months against 1.1% for goods, a gap of 3.9 percentage points, and services have now run ahead of goods for three years. The fastest-moving categories were the summer ones: travel consulting and rental services up 11%, culture, sports and leisure up 10.1%.

Digital reading and streaming lifted communication and information services by 11.9%, and online sales of services grew 5.2%, a shade faster than services retail as a whole. Box office takings for commercial performances rose 9.4% in the first half. The NBS reads all this as households moving beyond buying goods towards paying for services and experiences.

Two forces sit behind this. On the supply side, much of it is made by the people who turn up. The comic festival came out of illustrators, a venue, a few social media accounts and a crowd willing to get wet. Museum evenings, night markets and character-themed shops run on the same logic. They cost relatively little to start and can change fast, so they keep pace with what younger customers actually want. On the demand side, those customers travel more often now and want more than a photograph at a famous gate. Foreign visitors want much the same. In the first half, they stayed in homestays in 330 Chinese cities, across all 31 provincial-level regions, averaging 2.8 days, roughly 10% longer than in 2025.

Policy opened the door. Visa-free arrangements now cover more than three-quarters of foreign arrivals, and the 240-hour transit scheme operates at 65 ports in 24 provinces. In March, the Ministry of Commerce and eight other departments issued 16 measures on inbound spending. Cities added their own. The two abovementioned airports in Beijing run one-stop desks for visa-free transit, the city's GO BEIJING platform offers 39 services in 16 languages, and some 18,000 major merchants now take foreign bank cards. Beijing's departure tax refunds rose 44% over the first seven months, and the number of participating shops passed 2,000.

China's visa-free arrangements are likely to attract more foreign visitors. Whether they stay for the full 10 days, return the following year, or encourage others to visit will depend on a range of seemingly small but consequential details such as whether a payment app accepts foreign cards, whether trains run on schedule, and whether streets remain safe late at night. These everyday conditions also enable a handful of illustrators to turn an old grain warehouse into a lively cultural space on a rainy afternoon, drawing readers who are already waiting to enter. The July figures have now given statistical weight to a trend already visible to those traveling across China this summer.

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