Chinese consumers' New Year spending returns to pre-pandemic trend

China's New Year (also known as the Spring Festival) is the nation's most important holiday. It's also a key moment for the economy; as people travel to reunite with family, we can gather key data points on travel, leisure spending and more. A year ago, we wrote that domestic mobility during the Spring Festival was sending encouraging signals about post-pandemic consumer confidence.

For the 2025 holiday that just ended, we've compiled this dashboard using a range of figures just released by the ministries overseeing cultural industries, tourism and transport.

In summary, growth has plateaued somewhat; that 2023-24 snapback in many categories would not have continued at the same pace. However, tourism, international flights and trips to the cinema all posted year-on-year growth – suggesting a reversion to pre-pandemic long-term trend lines, as suggested by the 20-year time horizon of our first chart.

This visualization compares various absolute measures of tourism – the number of Spring Festival tourists, their per-capita spending, and total tourism sector spending – and layers on bar charts to represent year-on-year growth rates. Only 2008, 2022 and (of course) 2020 saw declines. The total number of tourists during the holiday surpassed 500 million for the first time, marking a 5.9% year-on-year increase; tourism revenue reached CNY 677 billion, up 7% year-on-year.

Our second chart is a similar visualization for China's cinemas. The sector's revenue and attendance kept climbing; per capita movie spending snapped back after that measure declined in 2023 and 2024. The average ticket price rose to CNY 50.86, compared to CNY 49.18 last year. Meanwhile, the top-grossing film "Ne Zha 2" during the Spring Festival accounted for more than 50% of total box office revenue; the thriving movie market spurred demand at nearby dining and retail options.

We can also break down China's preferred modes of transport during the festival. Overwhelmingly, people took to the road in their own cars (almost 87% of such trips); inter-regional travel reached 2.31 billion trips, slightly higher than the 2.29 billion trips recorded in 2024.

Finally, we explored air travel – comparing the Spring Festival's 2025 vs. 2024 growth rate to similar trends for October's National Day break to get a sense of shorter-term changes.

Japan, South Korea and Thailand were the most important destinations as measured by the absolute number of flights.

In all cases but Cambodia, October 2023 vs. October 2024 "snap-back" growth exceeded the more modest year-on-year New Year growth rate. The United States is a particular outlier on our chart; compared to intra-Asian destinations, US-China flights took longer to resume after the pandemic, resulting in outsized 2023-24 growth.

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