BEIJING – Before Beijing’s Happy Valley amusement park opens each morning, its employees conduct security checks and runs “empty car” tests on rollercoasters – inspections that will be repeated more often throughout the day as the park braces itself

for an influx of visitors during China’s Golden Week holiday.

Between Oct 1 and 8, hundreds of millions of Chinese will be travelling across the country, creating a surge that

could overwhelm popular tourist sites such as the Great Wall and reviving longstanding concerns over overcrowding and safety.

From Hangzhou’s West Lake to Mount Hua in Shaanxi province, famed for one of the world’s steepest hiking trails, tourist hotspots across China have stepped up precautions, from using tools such as AI-powered real-time crowd monitoring to deploying heavier security patrols so they can

keep the holiday rush under control.

China’s domestic tourism boom, which has almost entirely bounced back from the pandemic-induced slump, is both an economic lifeline and a stress test, analysts said.

While the Golden Week travel rush brings in the vital tourist spending China needs to bolster its sluggish economy, it also exposes the fault lines of an industry where ageing infrastructure, uneven enforcement and gaps in emergency preparedness collide with soaring demand.

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Lai, a strategy consultant at Daxue Consulting in Shanghai, said safety rules are more rigorously enforced at flagship 5A-rated attractions, which tend to draw the most crowds, but conditions vary widely at less-developed sites.

“Ageing infrastructure and gaps in enforcement are particularly serious at lower-tier or privately operated sites, as well as in newly developed rural areas, where oversight is often weaker,” she added. Chinese authorities estimate that 2.36 billion cross-regional trips will be made over the eight-day holiday in 2025, averaging about 295 million journeys a day, up 3.2 per cent over the same period in 2024.

The annual holiday, which combines China’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival, has traditionally produced peak numbers of travellers and has long symbolised both the scale and strain of China&...