Posted On: Tuesday - December 17th 2019 8:36PM MST
In Topics: China Economics Geography
(Zerohedge has become pretty much the De Beers of stupidity, nay, it's the mother lode itself. I'll try not just to keep going there for material - I may end up reading comments there for an hour. This one is kind of up their old-fashioned financial alley, partly.)
Note that these are Jan-May numbers only, just for year/year comparison of the busiest season. There are a lot more than 1.6 million Chinese travelers outbound to the US per year, then.
Zerohedge says "China Tourism To US Expected To Drop During Lunar New Year", the slight drop seen supposedly attributable to the trade war*. Whatever. Zerohedge is not good with details, unless it involves some magic numbers for stocks or funds, based on that technical stuff. Therefore, I'm not sure if these outbound bookings, taken from airline information, include visa information. Can return travel by Chinese people in America who come back to China for vacation be part of this? That's a big thing during the 2 week Chinese New Year period.
Really, I don't care much. Peak Stupidity wrote our post about the Chinese tourists, dubbed "The Ugly Chinaman" last summer after seeing the tourism in Europe. As I wrote, more power to these middle-class Chinese people for working hard to get the cheap deals in order to learn about the rest of the world. However, for America, tourism of any kind is not really something that ought to be the be the be-all/end-all for a real economy. Sure, NY City (because "... I wouldn't wanna live there" and all that), Charleston, SC has lots of old stuff, and then there's that biggest** ball of yarn in Cawker City, Kansas.
Tourism is called an "industry", but it's not, by definition. Tourism requires lots of service jobs, which are mostly not high-paying. It requires the population to be told to be nice and have smiling faces. That's not my job though - I have a job. To this day, I can still remember a bumper sticker I saw more than once in central Florida in the '80s that said "Welcome to Florida - Now go home!" Tourists are annoying, and if you have a beautiful place going, why would you want to share it with picture-taking, bad-driving tourists? Maybe one can get a slight bit more peace and quite in the national parks this year. (Granted, if you're a real hiker, this tourism thing shouldn't affect most of your trip. There are no phone chargers on the trail, weeding out 99.8% of the tourist set.)
You're better off having manufacturing of all sorts of things as the basis for your economy. That is what the "trade war" with China is about anyway. Let the tourists go elsewhere. Per ZH:
Chinese middle class, some of the richest in the world, is expected to abandon the US for Japan, Thailand, and South Korea, during the holiday week next month.Oriental tourists are going to visit places in the Orient? Well, sure French people go to Spain, and so forth, but that seems somewhat far-fetched that this "abandonment" will go that direction. I have a feeling that the travelers to Thailand and Korea are not your low-budget tour group people, but more your low-budget hooker aficionados.
Anyway, this is not a worrisome development. Even tourists from the other side of the country are an annoyance lots of the time. With the exception of the chamber of commerce and service industry people most residents of tourist area enjoy getting a break for part of the year, with NY City being an exception:
* Kind of misnamed, just as our "Civil War" was more a war of northern aggression, or at least "the War between the States" than a true civil war. How about we call this thing the "Crusade for Fair Trade"?
** That's by diameter, not necessarily mass, mind you.
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