BizChina

China's tourism authorities announced on Tuesday that tourism boomed in the country during the seven-day Lunar New Year holiday with over 70 percent of trips made within the Chinese mainland.

"According to data from bureaus of major domestic tourist destinations, during the first five days people made scores of times more trips than before," said an official with the National Holiday Tourism Office.

For example, on the first day of the lunar year, which fell on February 3, Shanghai Century Park received 13,500 visitors, which is about 30 times that of the first day of the holiday last year.

Meanwhile, outbound trips increased sharply. A total of 67,500 people left Beijing for overseas trips during the holiday, which is an increase of 59.6 percent from the same period last year.

From February 2 to 9, 350 flights departed from China and arrived in Thailand, 130 of which were chartered flights to Phuket Island, Samet Island and Samui Island.

Private Chinese enterprises exported goods worth $481.3 billion in 2010, a jump of 223 percent compared with 2005, said a report by the All-China Federation of Industry & Commerce (ACFIC).

The year-on-year increase on average has been 26 percent over the past five years, the association, which governs the nation's more than 40 million private and individual businesses, was quoted by Xinhua News Agency as saying on Tuesday.

"China's private sector has become a major player in foreign-trade market. Since the global financial crisis, those enterprises have taken full advantage of the country's stimulus policies and made much headway in tapping the international market," said the ACFIC in the report.

Overseas investment by China's private enterprises is no longer limited to economically underdeveloped regions, such as Africa and Latin America, but has been extended to many other, more mature markets, such as North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea, the ACFIC report said.

The chairman of one of China’s largest financial information companies has formally become the country’s newest billionaire after a successful listing at the Shanghai Stock Exchange today.

Shares in Shanghai Great Wisdom closed at 25.38 yuan, or about $3.85, up from their IPO price of 23.20 yuan. Chairman Zhang Changhong’s 386 million shares in the company were worth 9.8 billion yuan, or approximately $1.5 billion, at the day’s close.

Buoyed by a strong economy, China has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing countries for new billionaires in recent years. It had 128 of them on Forbes Asia’s China Rich List published last October, the second-largest group in the world after the United States.

Shanghai Great Wisdom provides financial statistics and analysis to about 10 million users daily though PC terminals plus another two million via mobile phone, according to a report by brokerage SWS.

There is no limit to Wall Street’s ingenuity– especially when a brand new exciting opportunity presents itself to profit in the most dynamic of all the emerging markets, China.

Morgan Stanley, for example, has wasted no time in creating its own clever way to invest in China; a 5 year note with a stepped up interest rate that will be denominated in the Chinese currency– another example of Wall Street’s newest way to profit from the rise of China’s economy and the expectation that the value of its currency will rise in relation to the dollar. I say it’s like shooting ducks in a barrel.

The sale of Morgan Stanley Senior Fixed Rate Step-Up-Securities due in February, 2016 is also a clever way for the investment bank to raise capital for its own operations. The firm plans to list the notes for trading on the London Stock Exchange.