CRI听力:Overseas Travel by Chinese Mainlanders Reaches New High during Spring Festival

It's estimated nearly 6 million overseas trips are going to be made by Chinese people during this Spring Festival.

Leading online Chinese travel agency Ctrip has released its tourism outlook for the holiday, suggesting over 60 percent of its customers who have booked trips during the Spring Festival are planning to travel overseas.

Eight of the top 10 most popular overseas destinations are in Asia, with Thailand, Japan and South Korea high on the list.

Lu Yang is a spokesperson for Ctirp.

"Our latest data show that about 60 percent of Chinese travelers using our services will spend the Spring Festival traveling overseas, a record in recent years. This is the first time that more people choose to travel overseas than spending the holiday in China."

The China National Tourism Administration estimates Chinese people made 120 million overseas trips last year, with nearly 5.2 million of them taking place during the Spring Festival holiday, representing an increase of nearly 10 percent year-on-year.

These figures are in sharp contrast to what things were like here in China some 40-years ago.

74-year-old Wang Yanjun is a retired public servant in Beijing.

He says an overseas trip in the 1970's was simply unimaginable.

During that period, most people in China didn't have a passport, and would be unlikely to get one.

Wang Yanjun notes the politics of the time also meant that only people on official government trips were allowed to go abroad.

He notes even travelling within China was looked upon as suspect.

"Chinese people in the 1970s had no idea of traveling. If you told people you had plans to travel, they would think you were running away from your duties. People who loved traveling around were considered as those who are always loafing around and doing nothing."

But after the start of the reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970's, the situation began to change.

In 1983, ordinary people in China were first given the ability to travel to Hong Kong or Macao for family visits on package tour.

This was the first time average Chinese people were allowed to leave the mainland since 1949.

From there, China's tourism market began to emerge, with Thailand becoming the first non-Chinese territory people from the mainland could visit in 1988.

Nearly 30-years later, things have changed dramatically.

Rapid economic development and the relaxation of government restrictions on overseas travel mean that Chinese tourists can be seen almost everywhere in the world today.

China became the world's largest outbound tourism market and the largest spender in 2012.

In 2014, the number of overseas trips made by Chinese tourists exceeded 100 million for the first time.

Also in that year, Chinese travelers spent a record 165 billion RMB, a 28 percent rise year-on-year.

The situation has convinced many countries to open up their doors even wider to Chinese tourists.

Guan Cheng, is professor with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The 42-year old says he and his family have traveled extensively overseas, and says they plan to spend this Spring Festival in United States.

He says the reason he's chosen the US is due to a new visa extension policy which allows Chinese tourists to travel to the U.S. for up to ten years on a single visa.

"Many countries have relaxed their visa policy. I remember when we were in college, traveling overseas was almost impossible. Take the U.S. and Canada as an example. They would just refuse you when you wanted to apply for a travel visa. They were afraid what you really wanted was to immigrate to these countries, and not travel."

Malaysian authorities are among those looking to cash in on Chinese tourists as a measure to boost tourism.

Under new rules set to take effect on March 1st this year, any Chinese citizen travelling to Malaysia for less than 15-days will no longer need a visa.

In making the decision, Malaysian tourism authorities say they're hoping to draw around 8 million tourists from China every year over the coming five years.

They expect this could help generate revenues in Malaysia worth around 3-billion US dollars.

Romanian tourism authorities have also announced plans to ease visa rules for Chinese travelers in the next couple of weeks, cutting the time it takes to get a visa to Romania down to less than a week, provided they're travelling as part of a tour.

The World Tourism Organization of the United Nations says it fully-expects Chinese outbound tourism to continue growing, benefiting not only the economies of destination countries, but also helping promote better cultural exchanges and understanding.

For CRI, this is Luo Bin.