Here's what Golden Week tourism numbers scream about

Tourist visit rocketed 23.4% amid China's slowing economy.

According to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, China’s 1.3bn consumers are being closely watched this week amid escalating worries about China’s hard landing. To be sure, this year, we led the Street in cutting China’s GDP growth forecasts and we don’t expect a strong turnaround soon, but we believe worries about a hard landing are overdone in the market now.

Here's more from BofAML:

Strong tourism data (the number of tourists is up 23.4% yoy) for the first four days of the 8-day-long National Day Golden Week (from 30 Sep to 7 Oct) lends support to our soft-landing views.

Robust Golden Week tourism data also suggest that China’s GDP data, despite the low quality, might be more real than what’s perceived by bears who are focused too much on power usage and industrial production.

Tourism data also point to a shift of consumption toward leisure, a new source of demand. Stories about Golden Week also reveal some weak spots to be addressed: (1) The Golden Week created massive traffic jams and congestion in tourist destinations. In our view, replacing Golden Week with freer choices of holidays could increase consumption demand;

(2) Mismanagement of highways (cancelling highway tolls during Golden Week created massive traffic jams) means that policymaking in China could be refined to release consumption demand.

So far, we only have reliable data from the 119 major tourist attractions across China and passenger data from the Ministry of Railways (we will update you on retail sales and home sales data on 9-10 October).

In the first four days of the 8-day-long Golden Week, the number of tourists to the 119 tourist attractions totaled 18.2mn, up 23.4% from the first four days of the Golden Week last year. The total sales revenue of these tourist attractions reached RMB957mn, up 24.8% yoy. For comparison, the growth in the number of tourists in the National Day Golden Week was only 6.5% in 2010 and 8.8% in 2011.