CHINESE people are travelling in larger numbers domestically as the nation’s key holiday season kicks off, a sign that the end of the zero-Covid policy is giving way to a rebound in economic activity. 

Some 34.7 million trips within the country were made by road, rail, water or air on Saturday (Jan 7), the first day of the Spring Festival travel rush, said the Ministry of Transport. Another 35.4 million trips were made on Sunday.

The figures from each day were around 40 per cent higher than the equivalent periods in 2022. Xu Chengguang, the transport ministry’s vice-minister, said that the agency expected 2.1 billion trips to be made over the entirety of the 40-day Spring Festival travel season, called Chunyun. This would be nearly twice last year’s amount.

The increase in travel – along with other mobility indicators, such as jumps in subway usage and traffic congestion – boded for China’s economic outlook. It also suggested that the worst of the latest Covid wave might be over for major cities. 

Economists have been upgrading their forecasts for China’s growth following the dismantling of its zero-Covid policy. Last week, Barclays lifted its 2023 projection for the country’s gross domestic product growth to 4.8 per cent from 3.8 per cent, on a faster-than-expected reopening.

“Activities in China have recovered notably,” Tommy Xie, head of Greater China research at OCBC, said on Monday. He cited the widespread circulation of pictures of packed beaches in Hainan, a tropical-island province in southern China. 

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“The congestion levels in cities such as Beijing and Chengdu, which were first hit by the Covid outbreak, have recovered fully,” he added.

Traffic congestion in 15 major cities on Sunday climbed to 116 per cent of the level seen in January 2021, an index compiled by BloombergNEF using Baidu traffic data showed. The index tracks a seven-day moving average.

Subway usage in nearly a dozen major cities also continued to rise after hitting a low point last month, Bloomberg data showed. The number of daily subway passengers in 11 major cities jumped 20 per cent for the week ended Jan 8, from the figure in the week prior.

But China still has a ways to go before it returns to its pre-Covid levels.

That subway passenger traffic gauge for last week was still 24 per cent lower than the same period in 2021. And passenger volumes on the first and second day of Chunyun were only around half of the numbers recorded in 2019, said the transport ministry.

Vice-minister Xu said the total number of trips is expected to reach 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels by the end of the holiday season.

Last week, he said that this year’s travel period contained the “most uncertainty”, and was the “most complicated situation” in recent times due to the coinciding peaks of travel and the pandemic.

While all the preparatory work was “basically completed by now”, the ministry would continue to monitor the situation and optimise work as needed, he added. BLOOMBERG