China's newly wealthy rank travel as their top leisure activity, while spending time with their families places a distant seventh, according to survey results released Thursday.

Family time also ranked beneath activities such as swimming, golf, and hiking, according to the survey conducted by the Shanghai-based Hurun Report, a firm specializing in tracking consumer tastes among the Chinese elite.

Even so, the result marked an improvement of sorts for beleaguered spouses and lonely children.

"Last year, spending time with family ranked ninth, behind wine tasting," said Rupert Hoogewerf, Hurun's chief executive officer.

While high-speed, high-pressure modern lifestyles may be splintering the traditional family unit, Hoogewerf said family life was also being challenged by an increasingly crowded field of leisure options.

"People are spending a lot more time thinking about lifestyle," he said.

Along with leisure options, the survey queried 604 Chinese with more than US$1 million in assets on their preferences for luxury products and services, from yachts to private banking and online news.

German carmaker BMW was the top-ranked overall luxury brand, followed by French accessories maker Louis Vuitton and Mercedes-Benz.

Nokia was rated best mobile phone, while IBM was ranked the best laptop computer. Giorgio Armani was rated the top fashion label.

But while rich Chinese have more options for goods and services, they seem to have less time to enjoy them, said Peter Pun, China manager for market intelligence firm GMI, which collected the survey's raw data.

He said "very few" among those surveyed took 20 days or more of vacation a year, as opposed to more than 50 percent among Chinese as a whole.

"So we do really see that the lifestyles of the wealthy are far more rushed than among ordinary people," Pun said.

Survey participants were 80 percent male. Most reside in Shanghai and other wealthy eastern cities.

Australia was rated the top destination for international travel, followed by France and the United States, while China's southern resort of Sanya was ranked the top domestic leisure destination.

The United States was the preferred country for international education, followed by Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Figures on the numbers of China's super rich vary, although Hoogewerf estimated as many as 50,000 Chinese mainlanders have accumulated fortunes of at least US$10 million, and an upper crust of 100 to 200 have piled up US$100 million or more.

(Shanghai Daily January 13, 2007)