Welcome to Hainan, a tropical island where hundreds of CEO's, bankers, ministers, consultants and journalists are converging for the Boao Forum for Asia, an annual gathering with ambitions to become Asia's Davos.  The crowd is eager for signs of a Chinese recovery that will in turn help lift the rest of the world out of crisis.  Optimists need look no further than Hainan's own burgeoning travel industry.  Promoted as a tourist paradise, the island province attracted 20.6 million tourist vists last year, about triple the province's total population. With its languid beaches and balmy climate, the southern city of Sanya had mroe than 300,000 visits during the weeklong 2009 Lunar New Year holiday alone.  The crush left Sanya's 180-plus hotels fully booked, and prices at some of the skyrocketed as much as six or seven times the normal rates.

     The city is aggressively courting the holiday crowd -- a relatively new trend in a country where the concept of spending big while on vacation was considered decadent less than three decades ago, back when Hainan was an undeveloped malarial backwater. Travellers, most of them domestic, now spend more than USD 200 daily when vacationing in Sanya.  Accommodations run the gamut from comparatively pricey five-star regulars such as Marriott to A-frame honeymoon cottages and beachside tents (less than USD 50 a night at one new seaside resort).  A dozen more hotel are slated to open within five years.  In 2008 Sanya received six million visits by domestic Chinese travellers, and another half a million by foreign tourists, especially Russians.  That works out to the highest number of tourist visits per capita of any Chinese city, though the ration "still has a gap compared to that in Hawaii,l" says vice mayor Li Baiqing.

    Lured by Hainan's reputation as the "Hawaii of China," more and more domestic tourists are flocking to seaside cities such as Sanya. (Some are so enamored that they buy holiday homes; 85 percent of Sanya's real estate sales are to outsiders.)  Last year the domestic tourism numbers more than compensated for a 30 percent drop in visits by foreign travellers. Coming attractions under construction include an aviation park to attract well-to-do visitors with private aircraft -- as well as a rocket launch base "that will be like the Kennedy Space Center in Florida," says Prof. Zhu Huayou, of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, "This will also promote the tourism industry."  With domestic consumers filling the vacuum left by shrinking foreign demand, Hainan's tourism sector is hoping for lift-off.