Shenzhen marks New Year’s day with parade as tourist spending booms

More than 160,000 people gathered in Shenzhen on Feb. 17 to watch a New Year’s Day parade with more than 1,500 performers on Festival Avenue in Futian, as the city saw an overall boom in tourist spending during the holiday.

It is the parade’s third year, including 10 parade floats with 8-meter inflatable sculptures and 21 groups of performers of intangible culture and indigenous traditions.

Performances included the Sha Tau Kok fish lantern dance, the Chau Shan Yinge dance from Lingnan, the Shaanxi waist drum dance and the Shaolin 18 bronze men. Hong Kong performed the Yuen Long white-crested Kylin and Macau held a drunk dragon dance. Taiwan’s “electronic music kings” performed and there was also a Russian folk dance.

“I am very proud to be one of the performers coming here to showcase the culture of my hometown, a traditional ritual during ancestor worship, which are quite rare nowadays,” said Lau Zhigang, a performer of the Yinge dance from the Chau Shan region of Guangdong.

Crowds lined both sides of the 1.6-kilometer parade route with cheers of “happy new year” erupting as the parade passed by.

“The parade was wonderful,” a teacher working in Shenzhen said, adding that she will go shopping nearby and enjoy the rest of the holiday with her boyfriend.

Emma Lee, a visitor from Guangxi, was in Shenzhen for a three-day trip with her friend.  “It’s really a vibrant and energetic city full of technological elements,” she said.

The New Year holiday brought a boom in tourist spending, according to data from the business department of Futian district. The occupancy rates of the eight high-end hotels along Festival Avenue reached over 98%, and visitors to the surrounding business district reached 281,000 people, an increase of 14.98%, with total sales reaching 19.4 million yuan, an increase of 12.31%, compared to the previous year.

“It’s tough because we have planned since last month and rehearsed with these performers a couple of times. But when it comes to the end, I felt relaxed and happy that people could have a great experience today,” said Wung Tau, a staff member working on the event.