China's Road-Trip Awakening: A Travel Shift Taking Shape

Big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai remain mainland China's most popular destination for international travelers. But for most Chinese travellers, the country holds thousands of other places worth exploring that are not among the most well-known top touristic attractions such as the Great Wall or the Bund in Shanghai. Increasingly, the experiences travellers value most are found out on distant roads, at the lesser-known points on the map, and in the stretches between them. This article traces a trend taking shape — the road trip — exploring why self-drive travel has risen in popularity among local travelers in China and how it is gradually opening up to international visitors as well.

Part 1 — How Self-Drive Became China's Mainstream Way to Travel

For the last few years, self-drive trips have accounted for more than 70% of domestic travel in China, and the share continues to rise. According to the China Tourism Vehicle and Vessel Association, a national industry body, self-drive travel rose from about 64% of domestic trips in 2019 to 73.6% (3.6 billion) in 2023 and 77.4% (4.35 billion) in 2024. It is now, by a wide margin, the main way Chinese people travel within their own country.

As evidenced by online conversations and content, as well as first-hand observations on the road, a distinct road-trip culture is emerging, with its own landmark routes, range of scenery and cultures, and styles of lodging — in some ways echoing the rise of the road-trip culture that took hold in North America last century, but with Chinese characteristics.

Where the United States has Route 66 and the Pacific Coast Highway, China has the G318 Sichuan – Tibet Highway (Chengdu to Lhasa); the G227, a national road across the snow-capped Qilian Mountains that many road-trippers call one of the most beautiful in China; and the Duku Highway (linking northern and southern Xinjiang).

These roads pass both regional, ethnically varied culture and first-rate natural scenery. In place of America's roadside-motel tradition, China has seen rapid growth in rural guesthouses (minsu): by 2024 there were more than 400,000 guesthouse businesses, with nearly 60% founded within the previous three years — a sharp rise in new openings.

[Image: The Duku Highway]

[Image: A courtyard of a typical guesthouse (minsu) in East China. Image by Dragon Roads.]

Across our interviews, Chinese travelers returned again and again to one theme: the sheer scale and variety of China itself. The country is large enough to encompass several distinct worlds — desert and gobi, snow peaks and glaciers, karst pinnacles, tropical coastline — many of them major geological landmarks. Customs, dialect, religion, and cuisine can shift over the course of a single stretch of road.

Travelers repeatedly cited the Silk Road as the clearest example. It isn't a single destination but a route running across western China, linking desert oases, Buddhist cave-temple art, and the ruins of ancient towns — a whole that comes into view only by traveling it in stages. For visitors, it offers an unusually direct vantage point on the country's diversity, its modern development, and its natural landscapes.

[Image: Scenery along a self-drive route through Golmud, Qinghai — a key stop on the Silk Road]

Why now? Three forces are converging.

First, the expansion of the road network. China's expressway system has roughly doubled in a decade — from about 104,000 km at the end of 2013 to some 190,000 km today, already the largest in the world — while the wider road network now exceeds 5.58 million kilometers, enough to circle the equator roughly 139 times and reaching about 95% of the population. Just as important for reaching the interior, China has built more than 50,000 km of railway and highway tunnels combined, the largest such network anywhere; together with its bridges, these have pulled once hard-to-reach valleys, plateaus and mountain passes within comfortable driving distance. A long-distance road trip that would have been arduous, or simply out of reach, a decade ago is now an ordinary holiday plan.

[Image: G318 "Drive it once in a lifetime" car stickers, on a private car]

Second, cars have become widely accessible. At the end of 2015, China's vehicle fleet stood at 172 million, with 124 million private cars; by 2025 it had more than doubled, reaching 366 million, of which 323 million were private cars — about 23 private cars per 100 people — helped in part by increasingly affordable cars, including electric vehicles. From 2014 to the end of 2024, the number of licensed drivers rose 105.69%, passing 500 million for the first time to reach 506 million (up 4.12% year on year).

Car rental has grown in parallel: the self-drive rental market is estimated to be expanding by about 10% a year, and by 2024 the ratio of rental-car to private-car self-drive trips had reached nearly 3:7, indicating that rentals have become the sector's main source of growth. The 2024 China Self-Drive Tourism Report, published by the New Era Culture and Tourism Research Institute in September 2024, notes that the rental industry has developed over nearly three decades, grown more than thirtyfold, and moved from a fragmented early stage toward greater regulation. When a destination is far from home, flying and renting a car on arrival is often more practical than driving one's own car the entire way.

Third, a generational shift. As elsewhere in the world, younger Chinese travellers tend to prefer setting their own pace. According to the 2025 Young People's Travel Trends Report, jointly published by DT Business Observation and Yicai, they are moving away from the "special-forces tourism" favoured by older generations — an intensive style that packs many sights into a single day — toward more independent travel organised around personal interests and timed to avoid the crowds. Survey data align with this: people born in the 1980s and 1990s make up about 75% of self-drive travellers, and families with children more than half. Younger travellers increasingly describe what they want as interest-driven, immersive and experience-based.

[Image: A couple on a self-driving trip in Zhejiang, China]

Underlying these shifts is a change in what people seek from a trip. A commentary in Economic Daily observed that travel in China is moving away from "zǒumǎ guānhuā" (走马观花, literally "viewing flowers from a galloping horse" — hurried, surface-level sightseeing) toward something closer to an extension of everyday life: travellers increasingly want depth, a sense of connection, and a genuine encounter with local culture rather than a brief stop. That preference is part of what has made the car central — among the available options, self-driving lends itself particularly well to that kind of slower, more independent travel.

Part 2 — How Chinese Travellers Do It: What a Car Makes Possible

Two patterns sit beneath the trend. Most self-driving is short and close to home: across the six major public holidays of 2024, 49.3% of domestic tourists travelled by car, and among those self-drive trips roughly 70% stayed local, about half lasted under 12 hours, and half went no farther than 80 km from home (China Tourism Academy). The longer, multi-day end is smaller but growing fastest — by 2024 some 70% of self-drive trips included at least one overnight stay, and three days had become the sweet spot (2024 China Self-Drive Tourism Report). A car is what makes both ends work.

A useful starting point is that short-haul majority. Take a trip from Shanghai, where many short routes lie within reach. Without a car, an itinerary tends to stop at the well-served, easily reached sights: a high-speed train to Suzhou or Hangzhou and a walk through busy classical gardens and old temples. With a car, the range widens — up into the hills of Moganshan, to guesthouses set deep in bamboo forest; into the valleys of Anji, along terraced tea fields and mountain streams; and through countryside with little rail or bus service, where the pace of rural life slows. The contrast — from a major city to quiet villages within a single trip — is much of what self-driving makes possible.

[Image: Self-driving through the bamboo forests of Anji. Image by Dragon Roads.]

Beyond weekend and short trips, the common approach to longer journeys is what might be called "long-haul transport plus rental": travelers cover the cross-province distance by high-speed rail or air, then rent a car on arrival for local exploration. In the tourism-rich central and western regions, where the rail network is thinner than along the coast, many places can only be reached by road and can be strung together into a single route — well suited to a full holiday. Travelers driving the Qinghai–Gansu Loop — roughly 3,000 km over six to ten days — often fly from their home city to Xining in the west, pick up a car booked in advance through an app, and set out from there. Because roads in the northwest are rougher than in cities and driving days are long, an SUV is a common choice; afterward the car can be returned to a nearby branch before a flight home.

[Image: An eHi Car Rental location in Xining. Image by Dragon Roads.]

Given the country's size, where do people drive? Its best-known routes function, for many, as a kind of checklist. Survey data ranked the ten most popular self-drive routes of summer 2024 as:

• the Northern Xinjiang Loop;
• the West Sichuan route; the Lijiang–Dali–Shangri-La line;
• the Qinghai–Gansu Loop;
• the Huangguoshu–Xijiang–Libo–Fanjingshan line (across Guizhou);
• the Southern Xinjiang Loop;
• the "Snow Town" route (in the northeast);
• the Hulunbuir grasslands route (Inner Mongolia);
• the Zhongwei–Alxa route (desert northwest);
• and the Guilin–Yangshuo line.

Part 3 — International Visitors: "Inbound 2.0," and the Frictions That Are Disappearing

If inbound tourism once meant Beijing and Shanghai, a second phase now appears to be underway. In 2025, China recorded 154.5 million inbound visitor arrivals, including 35.17 million foreign nationals — the latter exceeding the roughly 31.88 million of 2019, before the pandemic, and setting a record. Behind the change is something less conspicuous than new highways but no less important: over the past few years, many of the small obstacles that once discouraged foreigners from travelling independently in China have been removed one by one — what might be called the invisible infrastructure of inbound travel.

Mobile payment. Payment came first. From mid-2023 (July 2023 onward), Alipay and WeChat — the two mobile-payment platforms used for nearly all everyday transactions in China — allowed foreign visitors to link overseas bank cards, addressing what had long been the biggest pain point.

[Image: Buying a cup of coffee by the roadside in Hainan with WeChat Pay. Image by Dragon Roads.]

Cars and driving. Driving itself became easier, too: eligible foreign visitors can obtain a temporary Chinese driving permit in a number of cities using a home-country licence and a translation, while major rental companies such as eHi and CAR Inc. now offer English-language interfaces and service, making booking, pickup and payment steadily friendlier for international travellers. Navigation followed as well: Amap, China's leading mapping app, released an English-language version.

[Image: Navigating with Amap Global, China's leading mapping app. Image by Dragon Roads.]

Translation and communication. On top of this, artificial intelligence can now turn a phone into an interpreter at a roadside restaurant: apps such as Baidu Translate and Microsoft Translator render a menu or a sign in real time, and WeChat's built-in translation lets a typed conversation run in two languages at once.

Facilities at attractions. Tourist infrastructure is also becoming more international. A growing number of sites now have multilingual self-service ticket machines, English online-booking platforms and services for foreign visitors, so international travellers can generally handle ticketing and entry on their own.

These conveniences are matched by easier entry and longer stays. Dozens of countries now have visa-free access, and a growing list of ports of entry offers transit stays of up to 240 hours (ten days) without a visa. By 2025, international flight capacity had recovered to more than 90% of pre-pandemic levels. Longer permitted stays and more points of entry are what make a genuinely deep-interior road trip feasible for a foreign visitor in the first place.

The trajectory is not unfamiliar. Japan went through two comparable stages: in the 2010s, looser visa rules, expanded air routes and improved payment options drove inbound numbers up sharply — from about 10 million foreign visitors in 2013 to nearly 32 million in 2019; then, after the pandemic, the return of individual travel and visa-free entry shifted demand from conventional sightseeing toward more independent, in-depth travel. China today sits roughly at the meeting point of those two stages.

Conclusion

Set the numbers aside for a moment. Ge Lei, a veteran of China's travel industry, has offered a definition that gets to the essence of it: travel, he said, is the joy, the feeling and the memories that gradually settle within a person through their encounters with the world — or, more simply, "a way of living, in motion."

That, in the end, is what is taking place on China's roads. A growing number of people — first Chinese travellers, and now international ones — are coming to know this large country not through a tour-bus window or from a single famous viewpoint, but in motion, one stretch of road at a time. And the car carrying them across plateaus and river valleys is, increasingly, a quiet electric one: a small but fitting detail of China at this particular moment.

[Image: Xiaomi SU7. Image: JustAnotherCarDesigner, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Source notes

1. Self-drive at 77.4% / 4.35bn trips (2024); 73.6% / 3.6bn (2023); ~64% in 2019 — China Tourism Vehicle and Vessel Association, Report on the Development of China's Self-Drive, RV and Camping Tourism (2024–2025) (via People's Daily Online, China Daily). See also China.com, "Report: Chinese tourists prefer self-drive, short trips dominate": http://travel.china.com.cn/txt/2020-09/20/content_76722357.html

2. Roads: ~4.01m km (end-2010), ~4.57m km (end-2015), ~5.20m km (end-2020), ~5.49m km (end-2024), >5.58m km (end-2025); ~190,000 km expressway (world's largest); ~95% population reached — Ministry of Transport annual bulletins; historical totals via China National Highway & Logistics Association for 2010 (https://www.chhca.org.cn/html/87/201104/3179.html), CCTV News for 2015 (http://m.news.cctv.com/2016/06/17/ARTI5ysWqfu4ftAYfFVciybY160617.shtml), China Daily for 2020 (https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202105/19/WS60a5bb06a3101e7ce97507c7.html), and Ministry of Transport for 2025 (https://www.mot.gov.cn/gongkai/zcjd/202512/t20251226_4191511.html); highway length via CEIC: https://www.ceicdata.com/zh-hans/china/highway-industry-overview/cn-highway-length-of-highway ; national road-network plan (≈461,000 km by 2035): https://www.news.cn/politics/2022-07/25/c_1128861083.htm ; bridge records via Xinhua: https://www.news.cn/politics/20240920/ea4c3429316e4b7c8081236c4b922892/c.html

3. Expressway ~104,000 km at end-2013, already first in the world — Ministry of Transport, interpretation of the 2013 National Toll Road Statistical Bulletin (交通运输部《2013年全国收费公路统计公报》解读): by end-2013 China's expressway network reached 104,400 km (10.44万公里), having surpassed the United States to rank first. Primary (MOT government-disclosure portal): https://xxgk.mot.gov.cn/jigou/glj/202006/t20200623_3312237.html ; mirror (MOT policy-interpretation site): https://www.mot.gov.cn/zhengcejiedu/2013shoufeigltjgb

4. >50,000 km of railway and highway tunnels combined, world's largest — China Association for Science and Technology: https://www.cast.org.cn/xw/MTBD/art/2025/art_b87b150bdc1f423e8be13b4e863d01ad.html

5. Vehicle fleet 366m (2025); 323m private (≈23 per 100 people); 172m / 124m private at end-2015; 506m licensed drivers at end-2024 (+4.12% YoY, +105.69% vs 2014), first time above 500m — Ministry of Public Security annual releases. 2015 data: https://www.mps.gov.cn/n2254098/n4904352/c5141532/content.html ; recent totals: https://www.mps.gov.cn/n2254314/n6409334/c10383533/content.html ; private cars 323m end-2025 (NBS): https://tech.ifeng.com/c/8r70OyS9Zqz ; drivers above 500m: https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2025-01-21/doc-inefsutn6746773.shtml

6. Guesthouses (minsu): >400,000 businesses by 2024, nearly 60% founded within the previous three years — China Homestay/Guesthouse Industry Development Trends Report 2025: https://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/H3_AP202503201644983632_1.pdf

7. Self-drive rental market growing ~10%/yr; rental-to-private trip ratio ~3:7; industry ~30 years, >30× growth — New Era Culture and Tourism Research Institute, 2024 China Self-Drive Tourism Report (Sept 2024). Rental demand example: "2026 Spring Festival rental boom; eHi records" (Sina Finance): https://finance.sina.cn/stock/jdts/2026-02-26/detail-inhpckas1579405.d.html

8. Decline of "special-forces tourism"; rise of interest-driven/immersive/experiential travel — DT Business Observation × Yicai, 2025 Young People's Travel Trends Report: https://dt.yicai.com/news/149.html

9. 1980s–90s cohorts ≈75% of self-drive travellers; families with children >half; top-10 summer-2024 routes — 2024 China Self-Drive Tourism Report (New Era Culture and Tourism Research Institute): https://www.fxbaogao.com/view?id=4516202

10. "Travel as an extension of everyday life"; moving past "走马观花" — Liu Lu, "Tourism should move beyond the 'galloping-horse' model," Economic Daily, 2026-05-29 (reprinted by People's Daily Online): http://finance.people.com.cn/n1/2026/0529/c1004-40729984.html

11. Holiday self-drive split — 49.3% drove; 70.6% local; 49.9% under 12 hrs; 50.0% within 80 km — China Tourism Academy (中国旅游研究院), China Domestic Tourism Development Annual Report 2024 (《中国国内旅游发展年度报告2024》). The four percentages (49.3 / 70.6 / 49.9 / 50.0) appear verbatim at the Academy's site (ctaweb.org.cn/xsjl/10019.html) and mirrored at 品橙旅游 (pinchain.com/article/328138).

12. Overnight ~70.2%; 72-hour ("3-day") sweet spot; mid/long-haul self-drive >50% — 2024 China Self-Drive Tourism Report (《2024中国自驾游报告》, New Era Culture and Tourism Research Institute; same report as notes 7 and 9). Summary via Sohu listing "72小时是自驾游'黄金时间',自驾游平均过夜比例约70.2%" and "中长途自驾游占比超五成": sohu.com/a/810166008_121838586

13. 2025 inbound 154.5m arrivals, 35.17m foreign nationals; ~31.88m foreign nationals in 2019; visa-free expansion, 240-hour transit visa-free — National Immigration Administration / National Bureau of Statistics (via Caijing and others). 2019 figures via Ministry of Culture and Tourism, "2019 Tourism Market Overview": https://www.mct.gov.cn/whzx/whyw/202003/t20200310_851786.htm

14. 2025 international flight capacity recovered to >90% of 2019 — Civil Aviation Administration of China (via Sina Finance, Apr 2026).

15. Alipay/WeChat opened overseas-card linking from July 2023 — various reports (e.g. US Credit Card Guide, 2023.7).

16. Foreigners' temporary driving permit: issued on a home-country licence (plus translation), valid 3 months, available at many vehicle-administration offices/airports — Beijing Foreign Affairs Office and other public guidance (2024).

17. Translation apps (Baidu Translate, Microsoft Translator); multilingual ticketing at attractions — app documentation and public site information.

18. Japan inbound comparison: ~10.4m (2013) → ~31.9m (2019); visa easing for 40+ countries 2013–2018; individual travel and visa-free entry resumed Oct 2022 — Japan Tourism Agency / JNTO data; IMF working paper.

19. Ge Lei quote — from his talk "Tourism Marketing in the Age of the Mind," China Tourism Association: https://www.ctagws.com/h-nd-896.html . At the time he was described as vice-chair of the association's marketing branch and deputy dean of the CYTS research institute; the quote is translated from Chinese — verify wording and his current title before publication.

20. (Editor's note) Restrictions on foreigners self-driving into Tibet — the text mentions the G318 Sichuan–Tibet Highway / "roads toward the plateau." Foreign visitors cannot drive themselves into the Tibet Autonomous Region; entry requires a Tibet Travel Permit arranged in advance through a licensed agency, with a guide and arranged transport throughout. The text is neutral and does not claim foreigners may self-drive into Tibet.

21. (Background) National travel volume / Spring Festival movement — CNR, "Reading the 2026 Spring Festival travel rush by the numbers": https://news.cnr.cn/native/gd/20260301/t20260301_527540104.shtml