Shanghai Street View: Travel Tensions
As Shanghai returns to work from the week-long holiday, we’re getting bombarded by the usual crush of statistics that show just how many people visited our city, how many traveled outside, and which tourist sites were the most popular during the fall Golden Week. But this year really seems like a case where pictures are worth a thousand words, as many of my personal images seemed to capture an intensifying mobility and anxiousness that were new and just slightly unsettling during this year’s holiday.
I spent most of the latest Golden Week here in Shanghai, though I did make a day trip to the nearby water town of Xitang where the third installment of the “Mission: Impossible” movie series was filmed. That trip, along with my single venture to the East Nanjing Road pedestrian street, gave me more than enough reminder of the huge holiday crowds that typically flood into tourist attractions in both the city as well as in nearby towns.
But both of those trips had a newer element of heavy police presence this year, which was undoubtedly aimed at preventing situations from developing like the one that led to this year’s deadly New Year’s Eve stampede on the Bund that left 36 dead.
The other newer element for me this year was the huge volume of wheeled suitcases being carted around by people through our subway system and on the streets. Such suitcases are a regular fixture in the subways already, especially near big markets where merchants use the system to move their goods between shops and suppliers.
But this year felt like even more suitcases were moving around the streets of Shanghai than in past years, as individuals, couples and sometimes even entire families tried to navigate their way around the city in search of the compulsory holiday fun.
With all of that movement in the air, I was slightly surprised to read that the number of visitors to Shanghai’s major tourist destinations was down sharply this year, with fickle weather apparently playing an important role. According to the headlines, some 5.85 million people visited Shanghai’s top tourist attractions this holiday week, down a sharp 24 percent from 2014.
Outdoor Sites Hit Hardest
Outdoor sites took the biggest hit due to the poor weather on several days, with attendance at Century Park and the Shanghai Zoo down by nearly 40 percent. Indoor venues fared slightly better, but also saw attendance drop by double-digits.
Oddly enough, the number of people entering the city by car, plane and train all rose, so it’s not really clear why tourist attractions failed to post similar gains. Perhaps part of the reason was high ticket prices, which are constantly making headlines and are becoming a major financial burden for tourists. But perhaps some people were also just slightly nervous after the New Year’s Eve Bund stampede and avoided popular attractions for that reason.
The heightened police presence was certainly difficult to miss on my trip to Xitang, where officers were out in abundance trying to regulate the huge crowds plying through narrow streets and over bridges that were never designed for so many people. The situation was the same on East Nanjing Road, where officers were standing by in pairs throughout the area and the subway station was closed in the evenings to prevent overcrowding.
Such huge crowds contrast sharply with the China I remember from the 1980s. Back then you could always expect a crowd at certain places, most notably at train stations where people would crowd around unruly ticket counters and camp outside to wait for their trains. But there were few major crowds otherwise, and most of the big tourist attractions back then remained relatively easy to navigate even during public holidays.
New Travel Era
After seeing so many people towing wheeled suitcases this year, I had to think hard to remember what the situation was like when I first came to China 30 years ago. That’s when I realized that such images didn’t really exist, because no one traveled back then and thus there was very little need for suitcases. The few people who did travel mostly did so for work, and usually took just a few pieces of clothing on their trips, making large suitcases unnecessary.
Fast forward to the present, where the crowds seem to keep getting bigger and more unruly each year, and traveling over the holidays has become a sort of obsession for many. At the end of the day there’s really not much local officials can do, except to try and use police and other crowd control methods to maintain order and prevent accidents. Encouraging more people to travel on personal holidays rather than public ones would also help to ease not only the crowds, but also growing concerns and tensions that seem to be slowly creeping into the travel experience here in Shanghai and around China.
