(Yicai) Oct. 9 -- Almost 20 percent of Hong Kong’s residents travelled to the Chinese mainland over the eight-day long vacation that ended on Oct. 6, and visitors to the mainland from the special administrative region outnumbered the number of Chinese citizens heading south.

Almost 1.7 million Hong Kong residents visited the mainland over the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays, according to data from the Immigration Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. While around 974,000 people from the mainland travelled to Hong Kong over the period.

The number of people passing through the Shenzhen Bay Checkpoint, which is one of the main boundary control points with Hong Kong, more than doubled between Sept. 29 to Oct. 6 from the same period in 2019 to 4.9 million, according to data released by the checkpoint on Oct. 7. This amounted to 614,000 people a day.

And boundary control points between Hong Kong and Macao with the mainland were also bustling, indicating that regions in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area are becoming more integrated.

More people are travelling between Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao to start a business, job hunt as well as for their children’s education and elderly parents' care, whereas before travel was mainly to visit relatives, tourism and business trips.

And there are more people travelling from Hong Kong to Shenzhen than the other way round, Yicai noticed on visits to land ports Liantang and Luohu.

This is part of a wider trend. Hong Kong and Macao residents have been flooding into the mainland ever since Hong Kong re-opened its border in February. Hong Kongers paid over 9 million visits to Shenzhen between July 1 and Aug. 29, equivalent to each Hong Kong resident going to the Chinese mainland 1.2 times on average over the period, according to data from the Immigration Department of Hong Kong.

A man surnamed Chen took his family to Shenzhen and other cities in Guangdong province for three days, to shop and enjoy local delicacies. When researching the trip on social media he found there were plenty of other Hong Kong residents with the same travel plans, Chen told Yicai.

The long vacation was shorter in Hong Kong than it was on the mainland, ending on Oct. 2 rather than Oct. 6. This resulted in different entry and exit patterns, the head of the Shenzhen Bay Checkpoint said.

In the first three days of the vacation, most people entering Shenzhen were Hong Kong residents and those leaving Shenzhen were mainland residents. But on Oct. 2, there were a lot of Hong Kongers heading back to Hong Kong and quite a few people from the mainland returning. On Oct. 6, there was a small wave of mainland residents re-entering from Hong Kong.

Editor: Kim Taylor