Defying Economy, Chinese Hit the Road Joe Tsoi Chun-Kin, a 17-year-old student from the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, visits Hong Kong about every two weeks to shop for clothes and other items, spending a few thousand renminbi per trip. Chen Huiwen, a design student from Shandong Province, in northeastern China, comes every few months to stock up on cosmetics and clothes. He and his girlfriend were busy shopping for beauty products in the bustling, gleaming halls of one of Hong Kong's most upscale malls in the past week. Their total shopping budget for the trip: 30,000 to 40,000 renminbi, or about $5,000 to $6,600. Not far away, Cathy Chen Siwen, a sports teacher at a high school in Shanghai, was shopping for Apple products. Someday, she said, she hopes to travel to Australia and Africa. The Chinese economy is growing less swiftly, but one thing has not suffered at all: Chinese citizens" ravenous appetite for travel beyond their borders. Data released by Hong Kong on Friday showed that a record 40.7 million mainland Chinese crossed the border to the former British colony last year. That is up 16.7 percent from the previous year, and nearly ten times the 2001 number. And it means Hong Kong remains by far the most popular destination for Chinese travelers, who made a total of 97 million trips abroad last year - also a record - according to statistics released by Beijing this month. But, increasingly, Chinese tourists are venturing farther afield, as rising affluence and easing of visa restrictions in many countries make it ever easier for them to venture abroad. ""You'll be seeing huge growth in outbound Chinese travel,"" said Aaron Fischer, head of consumer and gaming research in the Hong Kong office of CLSA. ""Visitor numbers in some places are going to treble and quadruple in the next few years - it's a huge theme for the future."" Already, Chinese visitors are a common sight on Oxford Street in London, the Champs Élysées in Paris and Madison Avenue in New York. The Italian luxury retailer Prada has hired Mandarin- speaking sales assistants to cater to Chinese shoppers in Milan. Frankfurt Airport in 2012 introduced a Mandarin- language app providing flight and shopping information - all in a bid to cater to the swelling numbers of visitors from China, which has the world's second- largest economy, after the United States. And the trend is expected to continue. CLSA, in a 287-page report published Monday, said it expected the number of outbound Chinese travelers to double to 200 million by 2020. Hong Kong, Macau - a former Portuguese colony turned gambling hub - and Thailand are the top destinations now, and are expected to remain popular. But other destinations, too, will have big increases. By 2020, CLSA estimates, 5.7 million Chinese will visit the United States - up from 1.6 million in 2012. The numbers of visits to France and Germany are expected to about treble. Mainland visitors to Thailand could nearly quadruple, to 10.7 million. Large as those figures are, however, they remain dwarfed by the flood of mainland Chinese visitors to Hong Kong. They come here mainly to shop - and no longer just for big-ticket luxury items. ""Our family shops for household items and toiletries, like shampoo and body wash,"" said Lola Lu, an advertising agency employee, in the past week, on one of her weekly visits to Hong Kong. ""We also buy pills for colds and flu."" Taxes and price differences mean it is much cheaper to buy a Louis Vuitton handbag or an iPad Mini in Hong Kong than on the mainland. Some of the cross- border traffic from China is generated by traders who make multiple shopping trips a week to capitalize on such price differences. The renminbi's sharp rise since mid- 2010 against the dollar - to which the Hong Kong dollar is pegged - also gives mainlanders more bang for their buck. Mr. Tsoi, the student from Dongguan, was carrying a full suitcase and several carrier bags while shopping in Sha Tin, a neighborhood that has become increasingly popular with mainland shoppers, last Wednesday. ""I come here often and I shop for clothes mostly,"" he said. ""Clothes are cheaper here, because of the exchange rate, and the selection is better."" And then there is the perception that items bought outside the mainland are of better quality and likely not to have been counterfeited or tampered with - an important consideration in a country haunted by numerous scandals involving adulterated food and medicines. ""I like to buy face masks and cosmetics here to avoid fakes,"" said Luo Yuning, a high-school student who was visiting from Shenzhen in the past week. ""My parents like to shop at the pharmacies here and buy medicines that are neither made in China nor fake."" The sheer speed and scale of the influx has created problems. Hong Kong, with a population of just 7.1 million and an area about one-fortieth the size of Switzerland, is overwhelmed by the visitors, despite its modern infrastructure and the many malls and hotels that have sprung up to cater to them. Michael Wu Siu-ieng, the chairman of the Travel Industry Council in Hong Kong recently suggested that more shopping malls be built near the border with China and along railway lines to ease the strain on increasingly congested existing shopping hubs. Occasional spats have erupted over mainland visitors" perceived loutishness. Shortages of some brands of milk powder, caused in part by their popularity with Chinese shoppers, generated considerable public angst among Hong Kong parents last year. And the visitor influx is a big reason that retail rents and property prices in the city are among the highest in the world, making life hard for many small businesses, said Marcella Chow, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. At the same, time, however, the visitors - and their cash - play a major role in Hong Kong's economy and jobs market, and helped it weather the economic turmoil of the past years. The average amount spent by each mainland visitor has declined in recent years. But this is partly because wealthier Chinese increasingly travel to Paris or Milan to do their high-end shopping, and partly because visitors now no longer come predominantly from China's largest and wealthiest cities. Still, with overall visitor numbers still on the rise - CLSA expects more than 58 million by 2020 - the influx remains a key pillar of the Hong Kong economy, Ms. Chow said. Destinations in other parts of the world have taken note, and are hoping to get a slice of the Chinese tourism action. The flows, analysts and executives believe, mean big opportunities for airlines, hotels, entertainment venues and retailers from Paris to Milan, and New York to Las Vegas. ""Historically, mainland Chinese have traveled solely to shop close to home in Korea and Hong Kong,"" Mr. Fischer, the CLSA analyst, said. In the future, however, ""they will want to explore new frontiers, and do more things, when they travel abroad - that's the story for the coming years."" And it means that Ms. Chen, the sports teacher from Shanghai, could be the typical Chinese traveler of the future. ""I traveled to Cambodia once, with my dad,"" Ms. Chen said at the end of a day's shopping in central Hong Kong on Thursday. ""But if I had the choice, my first destination would be Australia. And then I would probably visit Africa, for the gorgeous beaches."" Alan Wong contributed reporting.