The Rise of the Chinese Tourist : The New Yorker
On Monday, Club Med, the French resort company, received a seven-hundred-million-dollar buyout offer from the Chinese conglomerate Fosun International. As with the acquisition yesterday of the American pork processor Smithfield Foods by Shuanghui International Holdings, the offer, put together by Fosun and a French insurance company, reflects a global shift in investments to the expanding Chinese market.
It’s a smart target to aim for. As Evan Osnos has written in the magazine, China has joined the Grand Tour tradition of newly wealthy countries exploring Europe. And according to a report issued last month by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the pace of those tours has accelerated. Chinese travellers have become the world’s top spenders, spreading a hundred and two billion U.S. dollars around the world in 2012. China is also the fastest-growing source of tourists over the past decade, with the number of international trips taken by its citizens growing from ten million, in 2000, to eighty-three million last year.
The rest of the world has been spending more on travel, too, led by economies that have already begun to recover from the global recession. Travellers in Germany and the United States, ranked second and third among tourism sources, spent around eighty-four billion dollars each in 2012, and, altogether, international tourism receipts grew by four per cent last year. The climate for some of Europe’s other international tourists, though, like France and England, has not been as favorable, and the tourism industry’s economic itinerary is likely to plan even more Chinese departures next year.
Illustration by Larry Buchanan.
The rest of the world has been spending more on travel, too, led by economies that have already begun to recover from the global recession. Travellers in Germany and the United States, ranked second and third among tourism sources, spent around eighty-four billion dollars each in 2012, and, altogether, international tourism receipts grew by four per cent last year. The climate for some of Europe’s other international tourists, though, like France and England, has not been as favorable, and the tourism industry’s economic itinerary is likely to plan even more Chinese departures next year.
Illustration by Larry Buchanan.
The Rise of the Chinese Tourist : The New Yorker
