Pursuits

China's 'Golden Week' Sales Shows Consumer Spending Strength

  • Restaurant, retail spending equivalent to Kuwait's annual GDP
  • Japan was top pick among the 4 million who traveled overseas

Customers use tablets to design their own T-shirts at a Uniqlo store in Shanghai.

Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
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China’s restaurant, cinema and travel sales surged in the ‘Golden Week’ national holiday, an indication that robust household spending remains a prop for a slowing economy.

The Oct. 1 to 7 holiday to celebrate the Communist Party’s founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 came this year after a period of historic volatility in China’s financial markets that rattled global confidence in the world’s second-biggest economy. While economists fretted, China’s workers splurged.