BEIJING -- Chinese spending over the Lunar New Year holiday weakened from 2021 amid strict measures to fight sporadic COVID-19 outbreaks and control people's movements due to the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Total tourist receipts for the seven-day holiday that began on Jan. 31 dropped 3.9% from last year to 289.2 billion yuan ($45.5 billion), while domestic trips fell 2% to 251 million, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Sunday.
Similar to last year's festival, local governments urged migrant workers -- estimated at over 500 million with many concentrated in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen -- to refrain from returning to their hometowns.
Schools across the country advised parents not to take their children out of their home cities for holidays.
"Some friends checked into local hotels for staycations, but we basically celebrated the New Year with home-cooked food," said Wu Jing, a mother of two toddlers in Shanghai. "There were too many restrictions to leave Shanghai for a break."
Businesses played their part as well. Cainiao, Alibaba Group Holding's logistics arm allocated $47 million in subsidies to pay over 150,000 employees and courier staff in 300 Chinese cities for work over the holiday. That means on average, delivery personnel would receive around 4,000 yuan in basic salary and bonus for working up to nine days during the spring festival -- equivalent to around half a month's usual pay.
At least seven "high risk" areas in the country, including Beijing, remained under lockdown with 1,495 people across the nation kept hospitalized for COVID as of Sunday.
Over 40 Olympic venues in Beijing, the suburb of Yanqing and co-host city Zhangjiakou have been inaccessible to the public due to strict "closed loop" controls to prevent infection among some 3,000 athletes. These measures also hit retail businesses in those areas.
"Chunjie was supposed to be our best time to make money," said a shopkeeper at a souvenir store in Zhangjiakou, referring to the Lunar New Year. "But this year is worse than last year."
"The perception has been that the games have taken precedence over the well-being of the economy as the mainland experienced a surge in COVID-19 cases beforehand," U.S. investment firm Jefferies wrote in a research note on Monday.
The ministry data revealed that 2022's tourist receipts and domestic trips were nowhere near levels seen over the same period in 2019, reaching just 56.3% and 73.9% of those totals, respectively.
Even entertainment, typically one of the favorite activities in cities during the weeklong break, failed to deliver.
Box office receipts dropped 22.7% from 2021 to over 6 billion yuan, while cinema admissions plunged 28.4% to 115 million viewers.
"Our baseline forecast for the first quarter GDP growth at 3.8% [annually] had already factored in a relatively sluggish recovery of consumption, so we still see near-term growth risks largely balanced around it," Citi Research economists Yu Xiangrong and Jin Xiaowen wrote in a note on Sunday.
"Looking further, we believe China will maintain its "dynamic zero-COVID" strategy at least until the 20th Party Congress in October or November, although fine-tuning in implementation is possible."
