China’s tourism sector recovering to pre-Covid levels
Apr-13-2021 By : fcccadmin
During the three-day Qingming Festival holiday on April 3-5, China’s tourism sector almost returned to pre-Covid levels. Chinese tourists made 102 million trips, recovering to 94.5% of the pre-Covid-19 level. Data released by China Railway also showed that 49.91 million passenger trips were made during this year’s Qingming Festival, recovering to 92.4% of the corresponding level in 2019. The figures shed light on the rapid recovery of the tourism market in the post-epidemic era and showed that in terms of trip numbers, the domestic travel market has almost entirely returned to normal.
These trends, along with hot bookings for the May Day holiday, have led some industry players and experts to predict that China’s tourism market will surpass the 2019 level during this year’s May Day holiday. Xu Xiaolei, marketing manager at China’s CYTS Tours Holding Co, said that on the company’s platform, the number of bookings for this year’s May Day holiday, such as for hotels and tourism sites, were already about 10% higher than in 2019. However, tourism income could remain below the pre-coronavirus level, with a recovery of about 60% to 70% from the 2019 level expected, as consumer spending remains relatively sluggish, experts noted. During this year’s Qingming Festival, China’s tourism income reached CNY27.17 billion, representing only about 56.7% of the pre-Covid-19 level. Zhang Lingyun, Director of the Tourism Development Academy at Beijing Union University, said that since incomes haven’t risen much, and inflation has been relatively high recently, it’s unlikely that most people will spend more on travel. “Certain places, like Hainan province, might see tourism income rebound to pre-Covid-19 levels, but for a general rebound is too early,” he said.
However, analysts expect consumption to play a bigger role in driving China’s GDP growth, and it could even push the economy to a growth rate of more than 8% in the second quarter. The IMF ratcheted up China’s 2021 GDP growth projection to 8.4% in the latest issue of its World Economic Outlook, up 0.3 percentage points from its January forecast. The IMF expects growth to slow to 5.6% next year, a projection unchanged from January. Despite the strong showing, it also warned geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. could weigh on recovery.
Wuhan, the city hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, was ranked among the top 10 domestic tourist destinations. One year ago, on April 8, the city ended a 76-day lockdown. Tourists viewed cherry blossoms at Wuhan University and around Donghu Lake, visited the landmark Yellow Crane Tower, and tasted local snacks and hot dry noodles at shopping streets. Wuhan was also among the top 10 cities whose residents were most enthusiastic to travel, according to travel platform Lümama. The Yellow Crane Tower and Wuhan Ocean Park were among the top 10 scenic spots in Central China during the Qingming festival. Hubei received 11.7 million tourists during the holiday, about 60% of the total number in 2019. Asking Wuhan people which sector in the city has witnessed the most changes one year after the lockdown was lifted on April 8, 2020, many pointed to snack stalls. A seafood restaurant owner surnamed Zhou whose restaurant was under renovation in Jiqing street, a popular nighttime food street with snack bars, night clubs and barbecue restaurants, told the Global Times that his business was now even better than in the days before the epidemic, so much so that he bought a neighboring store to expand his business, the Global Times reports.
According to a report by the China Tourism Academy, 4.1 billion domestic tourist trips are expected to be made in China in 2021, up 42% from 2020. Domestic tourism revenue is expected to surge 48% to CNY3.3 trillion. Although China’s domestic tourism is on an orderly recovery, a full recovery of spending will still take more time due to the high share of short-distance trips, low prices of tourism products and large-scale free admission and discounts, the Shanghai Daily adds.
Plans for maglev lines to cut traveling time, Shanghai and Guangzhou building travel hubs
Mar-02-2021 By : fcccadmin
A new maglev train could cut travel time between Shanghai and Guangzhou to 2½ hours. The project is included in Guangzhou’s masterplan for 2020 and 2035. The Department of Natural Resources of Guangdong province has publicized the blueprint on its official website to solicit public opinions through March 11. The plan was released along with another planned maglev line linking Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macao. The traveling time between Beijing and Guangzhou will also be shortened to about three hours and 20 minutes, half the time the Beijing-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway takes.
Shanghai has China’s first commercial maglev service, a 30 kilometer track linking Pudong International Airport with a metro stop in Pudong. The system, based on German maglev technology, can reach a top speed of just over 400 km per hour. China’s first medium-and-low speed maglev line with a design speed of 100 km per hour started operation in 2016 in Changsha, Hunan Province, the Shanghai Daily reports.
Shanghai plans to transform the Hongqiao area and neighboring locations into an international hub to further promote the integration and opening up of the Yangtze River Delta. The planned Hongqiao international hub will include the 151-square kilometer Hongqiao Central Business District located in the west of Shanghai and two extended strips – one going northward to Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and the other going southward to Haining, Zhejiang province. Hongqiao already has one of the country’s busiest international airports and a high-speed railway station. According to the plan, the area will be fully constructed by 2035. The plan aims to form a greater metropolitan city cluster around Shanghai that will further the delta’s integration with the world economy. The plan includes favorable policies such as facilitating foreign entrepreneurship, international trade and finance, and accelerating the construction and upgrading of regional railway networks and international transportation infrastructure. Many intercity rail lines and highways will be built to create a two-hour transportation circle between the Hongqiao Central Business District and major neighboring cities. The current Hongqiao transportation hub, which brings together high-speed rail, an airport and local metro lines, handles 400 million passengers a year.
Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, is promoting the construction of a global transportation hub by increasing investment in the building or expansion of its airport, ports, high-speed railway lines and expressways. It will also enhance connectivity with Hong Kong and Macao and other major cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to speed up construction of a world-class Bay Area, said Zhou Qingfeng, Deputy Director of Guangzhou’s Development and Reform commission. “As a national core city, Guangzhou will be able to play a leading role in coordinating and promoting the planning and construction of an advanced intercity railway network in the Greater Bay Area in the following years,” Zhou said. Guangzhou is planning to build a high-speed railway line linking Guangzhou South Railway Station and Guangzhou Railway Station that will reduce the time it takes to travel from its downtown area to Hong Kong to one hour. Guangzhou will also build a railway link with Macao. “Guangzhou plans to construct 15 intercity railway projects with a total investment of CNY398.3 billion to help connect Guangzhou with major cities in the Greater Bay Area,” Zhou said, as reported by the China Daily.
Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, the world’s busiest passenger airport last year, started its third-phase expansion project, including construction of a new terminal and two runways, late last year. The airport, which now operates more than 230 international flight routes, will have three terminals and five runways, allowing it to handle more than 140 million passengers a year once the expansion project is completed. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the Guangzhou airport handled 43.8 million passengers last year.
Yuan Yue, Deputy Director of Guangzhou Port, said it now operates more than 210 international container ocean routes and will complete the fourth-phase expansion of Nansha Port, located at the mouth of the Pearl River, this year. Guangzhou Port handled more than 56.7 million metric tons of cargo last month, a year-on-year increase of 19.3% and a record high for a single month. Its cargo throughput reached 636 million metric tons last year, ranking fourth in the world, while its container throughput was 23.5 million TEU, fifth in the world. Guangzhou’s transport department and metro company have also promised to expand and improve the city’s expressways and subway network to support its ambition to become an international transportation hub.
The Chinese government also issued a plan to upgrade the country’s transport network by 2035, when there are expected to be about 200,000 km of railways, 460,000 km of highways and 25,000 km of high-grade waterways, with 27 major coastal ports, 36 major inland ports, about 400 civil airports and about 80 postal express delivery hubs.
HNA Group, parent company of Hainan Airlines, files for bankruptcy
Feb-02-2021 By : fcccadmin
HNA Group, the parent company of Hainan Airlines, has applied for bankruptcy and reorganization after a long period of financial difficulties. The conglomerate said it has received a notice from the Hainan High People’s Court that creditors had sought the company’s bankruptcy and restructuring, after a government-led effort to reschedule its debts did not succeed. HNA said it will cooperate with the court and push forward debt restructuring. It will also support the court’s efforts to protect the legitimate rights and interests of the creditors and ensure normal operations of the company. HNA Group will undertake a series of measures, such as debt transfer, debt-swaps and debt restructuring, and look for new strategic investors, an unidentified HNA executive told the China Daily. Introduction of new strategic investors will bring new funds that could put the company back on the healthy track, he added.
The debt-ridden group requested Hainan province for assistance last year in February after its “self-rescue” efforts failed. The provincial government formed a joint working group in an effort to streamline the shareholdings of more than 2,000 enterprises under HNA Group to get a clear picture of the total assets and debts.
The executive said the bankruptcy and restructuring will not affect HNA’s aviation business, which comprises 14 companies and 700 commercial aircraft and is the country’s fourth largest air carrier. Gu Gang, former Executive Chairman and Board Member of HNA, has resigned and was appointed Party Secretary of HNA Group, the China Daily reports.
Once an aggressive dealmaker that spent extravagantly to buy stakes in foreign assets like Hilton Worldwide Holdings and Deutsche Bank, HNA Group, the owner of Hainan Airlines, started to save itself by selling some of its assets after a liquidity crisis gripped the company in 2017, focusing on its airline and tourism businesses, the Global Times reports. After years of debt and liquidity woes came the coronavirus pandemic, which plagued tourism and disrupted the aviation sector. In a statement on HNA’s WeChat account, the company said that risk disposal work is gradually being carried out, but the “severity of risks” must be given high attention. HNA Group owns more than 2,300 companies and has 290,000 employees. As of June 2019, HNA Group’s total assets were worth CNY980.62 billion with its gross liabilities reaching almost CNY706.73 billion. HNA also owns 25% of Hilton Worldwide, and is one of the biggest conglomerates in China.
Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission Chairman Yi Huiman said the Commission would strictly supervise companies’ delisting and encourage them to use different methods, such as expanding reforms, reorganizing the enterprise and taking the initiative to leave the market.
Direct international flights from some countries to Beijing resume
Sep-08-2020 By : fcccadmin
Authorities of Beijing Municipality announced plans to resume international flights from some countries directly to one of Beijing’s two international airports. Since March 23, flights with destination Beijing were diverted to other cities, such as Xian and Qingdao, were passengers were required to disembark, pass several Covid-19 tests and stay 14 days in quarantine, before boarding flights to their final destination of Beijing. The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) announced that in a first batch, direct flights from eight countries would be welcomed: Thailand, Cambodia, Pakistan, Greece, Denmark, Austria, Sweden and Canada. The first direct international flight to Beijing departed from Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, on September 3 and was operated by Air China.
“Resuming direct international flight signals that China has gotten domestic Covid-19 outbreaks under control. Though there have been small-scale resurgences, they all have been quickly contained and eradicated,” Zeng Guang, former Chief Epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times. The latest outbreak of Covid-19 cases in Beijing ended on July 20 and the city has reported no new case for more than a month. It does not mean, however, that Beijing – or other cities in the country – could relax their prevention and control measures, as China has been seeing growing numbers of imported cases in recent months, according to some experts.
Passengers arriving in Beijing from overseas need to be quarantined for 14 days and take nucleic acid tests twice. Ditan Hospital in Beijing was designated for treatment of those who test positive. In order to control the cross-border spread of the global pandemic, the CAAC said that it would impose stricter anti-Covid-19 prevention measures based on the existing “circuit breaker” mechanism. The regulator stressed that if three or more confirmed cases are found on an international flight into Beijing, the flight will be re-directed to another Chinese city. During trial operations, direct international flights to Beijing will have a passenger cap of around 500 each day in the beginning and this will be gradually raised to 1,000 after a test run. The total number of arriving flights should be no more than five daily. The passengers should be citizens of those foreign countries or Chinese people who are traveling back from those countries. People from third countries are not allowed to the direct flights. Beijing residents returning from those countries via direct flights will need to have another 7-day health monitoring period at home after the 14-day quarantine, said Tian Tao, responsible for community epidemic control in the city’s anti-virus work group.
“If we want to become a metropolis with a certain role and influence in the world, we must restore international communication. The flight resumption also shows that Beijing is back on track,” Sheng Guangyao, Research Fellow at the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies of the China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times. “We need to strike a balance between normalizing epidemic prevention and moving on,” said Sheng.
Wuhan, in Hubei province, will resume international flights in mid-September after a seven-month suspension, officials said. Several foreign carriers have applied to restart flights linking Wuhan to Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Hanoi, Sihanoukville, Tokyo, Jakarta and Singapore. The number of international flights operated by Chinese airlines is still only 10% of the number in the same period last year. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that global passenger demand in July (measured in revenue passenger kilometers or RPKs), continued to be critically low – 79.8% below July 2019 levels. Chinese carriers’ traffic was down 28.4% compared to July 2019.
Frontline aviation personnel will be among the first to be vaccinated, the CAAC said, but emergency vaccine use will only be given to volunteers aged 18 to 59. It has not been announced which vaccine they will receive. China National Biotec Group (CNBG) and Sinovac Biotech presented their Covid-19 vaccines at the opening ceremony of the CIFTIS services exhibition. Sinovac’s designed production capacity for the vaccine is 300 million doses annually. It takes 40 days for the company to produce one dose of the vaccine. CNBG is upgrading its manufacturing techniques to expand its production capacity from 200 million doses per year to 300 million doses per year, and eventually to 1 billion doses. The vaccines are expected to hit the market in December. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), phase Ⅲ clinical trials of eight candidate vaccines had kicked off as of September 3 with half of the candidates being developed by Chinese companies.
A ceremony was held in Beijing on September 8 to honor individuals and groups who fought against the Covid-19 epidemic. President Xi Jinping conferred the Medal of the Republic, the highest civilian honor, on respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan; and the national honorary title “The People’s Hero” on vaccine developer General Chen Wei, traditional Chinese medicine expert Zhang Boli and Director of the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital Zhang Dingyu.
China’s high-speed railway network to double in length by 2035
Aug-18-2020 By : fcccadmin
China’s unprecedented railway spending boom will continue for at least another 15 years and see its high-speed network nearly double in length, China Railway Group, the state-owned railway builder, said in a new blueprint. Under the plan, China will construct about 200,000 km of railways by 2035, a milestone year in which the nation is set to achieve President Xi Jinping’s vision for becoming a “modern socialist country”. That will mean a 41% increase in rail lines criss-crossing the country, up from the 141,400 km today, including about 70,000 km of high-speed tracks that will be able to accommodate trains running at speeds of more than 250 km/h. China had roughly 36,000 km of high-speed rail lines at the end of July, accounting for more than two-thirds of the global total.
State-led spending on railways has been an important part of China’s growth story for more than a decade. In the first half of 2020, fixed-asset investment (FAI) in railways rose 1.2% from a year earlier to CNY325.8 billion, even though China’s overall FAI fell 3.1% over the same period. China’s high-speed railway boom started in 2008 as part of stimulus measures to mitigate the global financial crisis. While China’s stimulus spending has ebbed since, the railway construction boom has been largely uninterrupted, despite the deadly Wenzhou train crash in 2011, the conviction of former Railway Minister Liu Zhijun on corruption charges, and growing debt in the sector. Extending the railway network is a long-term strategy to bind the vast country together into a single market.
Larry Hu, Chief China Economist with Macquarie Capital, said the blueprint reflects Beijing’s intention to sustain domestic growth with infrastructure spending. “China’s economic growth has three pillars: exports, property and infrastructure investment,” Hu said. “Exports can no longer be relied upon, and property speculation will be curbed, so infrastructure investment is the last pillar that shouldn’t fall.” China has also started to export its high-speed railway technology and expertise, especially to countries taking part in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). President Xi Jinping’s slogan of fuxing (rejuvenation) has been used to name the next-generation bullet trains that are set to completely replace the hexie (harmony) series built under former President Hu Jintao. While China’s railway system is heavily indebted on the whole, some of the high-speed railway lines, including the one connecting Beijing and Shanghai, have already started seeing operating profits. This offers hope that China’s high-speed railway lines can be financially sustainable as long as there is enough market demand.
Under the new blueprint, all towns with at least 200,000 residents will be connected to the railway system by 2035, while every city with more than half a million residents will have access to high-speed railway lines. Even China’s most remote cities, such as Kashgar in Xinjiang and Shigatse in Tibet, will be linked with high-speed railway services by 2035 according to the plan. Shen Jianguang, Economist at JD Digits, said “that migrant workers from central and western regions are more willing to take jobs in nearby cities instead of flocking to the coastal areas. If you look at places such as Xian and Lanzhou, these western cities are emerging as regional economic hubs. “It is a blueprint for 2035, when China will be much richer and more prosperous than today. It makes sense to connect every city with half a million people into the high-speed railway network.” China Railway Group said the country will deploy a range of critical and core technology by 2035, including special materials for tracks, and intelligent operating systems in trains, the South China Morning Post reports.
The Global Times adds that China Railways will use the Beidou Navigation System and 5G network in the train control system, increasing the accuracy of positioning, guaranteeing stronger security, and improving transport capacity by more than 30% as trains could travel closer together. When the new train control system is adopted, a round trip on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway could save about 9,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. China Railway also vowed to make railway technologies self-sufficient by improving the independent innovation capacity and modernization of the railway industry chain. The construction of smart high-speed railways will be completed first. In July, China’s railway cargo shipments continued to grow, reaching 320 million tons, up 24.66 million tons or 8.5% year-on-year. In 2019, the number of railway passengers transported reached 3.66 billion, and freight transport topped 4.32 billion tons, an increase of 93.3% and 10.6%, respectively, compared with 2012.
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