Editor's note: The following article was translated and edited from a blog post that appeared recently on iFeng.com's blog highlight section. It was written by a Chinese immigrant to the Netherlands who laments the dangerous overcrowding and uninspired attitudes that plague modern Chinese tourism, finally offering a solution inspired by his own experiences backpacking around Europe.

This year's 8-day Mid-Autumn Festival/National Day double holiday saw waves of Chinese tourists flooding the streets, ticket sales going through the roof, highways magically transforming into parking lots, pregnant women going into labor by the roadside, boats sinking in Hong Kong, tourists getting stabbed on Huashan mountain… Unfortunately, this kind of news hardly qualifies as news anymore—it's just another "Golden Week" in China.

Okay, so what are the benefits of having a simultaneous national vacation? Ticket sales at tourist sites get a huge temporary boost and local governments get some extra spending money, that's for sure. But at what cost to ordinary citizens, the ostensible beneficiaries of a national vacation? Their "holiday" becomes a kind of mandatory ordeal: hundreds of millions of people leaving home at the same time, hundreds of millions of people trying to get back home at the same time and everything going safely according to plan? Now that would be news.

Vacation styles: European vs. Chinese

Europeans somehow manage to find ample time to relax without the aid of "golden weeks." For them, the "heavy travel season" is from July to September. During this time, everyone from the rich and famous to the poor and boring select two or three weeks to use up their yearly-allotted travel days and shuffle off to a cottage in the countryside somewhere or go on a cross-country backpacking excursion, wearing sunglasses, doing nothing and tanning themselves silly. You know, generally just enjoying themselves however they want to.

When I first came to the Netherlands ten years ago, I stayed at a Dutch friend's house and stayed up all night watching his family's home movies. I remember being fascinated by how little life for them had changed in forty years; they still live in pretty little houses with gardens and a neat array of convenient home appliances, they still go on family trips every summer making happy memories in different cities all over Europe, just like they did in the 1950's and 1960's.

Since then I've been lucky enough to strap on a backpack of my own and go tromping all over Europe, and it's been an amazing and eye-opening experience to stay in people's homes, visit their museums and learn about their lives and their history. Slowly but surely, I started to see more and more Chinese tourists along the way. At first, it was only a few cautious Chinese government officials, then came the first few members of the new generation of wealthy Chinese, carrying insanely expensive DSLR cameras with ridiculously huge lenses just to photograph themselves flashing peace signs in front of various monuments and then, finally, waves of Chinese tour groups jostling off a bus, shouting and laughing and screaming like they're the only people around for miles, snapping a few photos and hopping right back on the bus again, their mission apparently complete, and, causing Western tourists—who until then had been patiently listening to the local tour guide—to stop and stare in amazement, first-hand witnesses to the birth of a new kind of tourism empire.

5,000 years of travel

Then again, travel has always had its place in traditional Chinese culture. From Confucius's solo overland wanderings to the overseas expeditions of Zheng He (郑和), travel—and the subsequent sharing of its life lessons and cultural exchange—is actually a recurring theme in Chinese history. Think of the late Qing traveller Shan Shili (单士厘) who compiled her adventures in Russia, Germany, France, England, Italy, Belgium, Egypt, and Spain into China's first real travelogue from a women's perspective (《癸卯旅行记》). Or the Taiwanese writer Sanmao (三毛) who studied in Spain, Germany, and America, who married a Spanish in the colonial Sahara desert and put it all to pen (《撒哈拉的故事》, 《雨季不再来》), leaving behind a legacy of travel literature to inspire a generation of young Chinese readers. What legacy will modern Chinese travelers leave behind? Millions of photos of girls making cute faces and peace signs in front of recognizable backgrounds? Billions of Weibo posts shouting hey everyone, look at me, I'm in this other country? Countless amounts of graffiti on ancient monuments announcing Zhang San was here? When Chinese tourists arrive in the Netherlands, the fairy tale/windmill/tulip capital of the world, what's the first thing they want to see? Amsterdam's red light district. Faced with the Louvre museum one could take days to fully explore, Chinese tourists prefer to spend half an hour stretching out in the courtyard, smoking, and staring out into the middle distance. They wait in lines to spend thousands of euros on purses on the Champs Élysées then cringe at the thought of parting with ten euros to buy an audio guide at a museum.

Aside from a few brave souls who really make the effort to experience another culture, the vast majority of Chinese travellers just don't know what travel is supposed to be. Most Chinese tourist's idea of a day trip is to go stand in a crowd and look at the backs of other people's heads—or asses, for children and short people. For those lucky enough to make it out of the country, it's usually on a package bus tour. Play cards all day on the bus, step out, snap a few peace-sign photos ("Yeah!"), pee, then hop back on the bus again. When it's all over you've got a stack of photos to bore your relatives with ("Wow, look at all the countries you went to!") and not much else. China may not be a fully developed country yet, but I have a feeling that knowing how to travel well isn't something that depends on your nation's per capita GDP—it's an attitude. You don't even need to spend money. Just head over to a park or something, eat some chips, listen to some music, read a book, look at the clouds, and relax.

A staggering difference

One may be tempted to think the situation is incurable, what with so large a population and all. And in the case of Spring Festival, one may be right. Going home for Chinese New Year is a tradition that I don't think we're going to get rid of any time soon and we may as well accept that that travel rush is just going to be part of the yearly festivities; an annual natural disaster, if you will. "Golden weeks" like National Day and the May Day holiday, however, are pure manmade disasters, reinforced by a nationally defined work schedule. What would happen if companies gave their employees a certain number of vacation days a year and it was up to them to decide when to spend them? Certain industries with less wiggle room could opt to stagger vacation times and business would continue as usual (no need to bring the entire country to a halt), ordinary citizens would become masters of their own vacations—by which I mean actually being able to relax. And tourist sites would see year-round streams of revenue instead of a few manic floods. Seriously, is there any downside to this plan?

Travelling is an important life experience, something that I hope all Chinese people can have a chance to enjoy, not just suffer through. I really believe it's a basic standard of living improvement that's not too far out of reach, if we only had some reasonable vacation policies.
 

Source: A Chinese Immigrant in the Netherlands (blog) (荷兰移民资讯)
 

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Keywords: Chinese tourism golden week China attitudes towards travel China Chinese tourists abroad