@Ishmael
The Chinese population isn't declining yet, but it will start declining soon.
This is common knowledge. Ask any Chinese demographer.
China is going the same way as Japan, Italy, Russia....
China is ticking demographic time bomb.
Soon, old people will outnumber young people by huge margins, and the traditional Chinese social system of the young caring for their elders financially will be overwhelmed.
The Chinese leaders realize this, and that is why they are now encouraging Chinese people to have more babies, like they do in Japan.
Unfortunately, young Chinese people just dont' want to have so many babies.
Yunnan is not a good example. The birthrate in Yunnan is much higher than in the coastal cities because of its heavy minority and rural populations.

Young Chinese people in the coastal cities view having children as a huge financial burden.

I'm just curious what the expect all those additional passengers to do in Kunming. Kunming is not exactly full of interesting things for tourists to do and its hard to see that changing in the next few years.

The interesting stuff is elsewhere in the province, and the provincial airports in those regions are already expanding themselves, with more and more direct flights to bigger cities in China bypassing Kunming altogether (e.g. Wenshan to Guangzhou, Lijiang to Chengdu, Tengchong to Beijing, Zhaotong to Chongqing).

Especially as the Chinese population begins to decline, foreign tourist arrivals continue to decline (as they already have started doing), the national high speed rail network continues to expand, and the national airspace gets more and more crowded, one would expect overall air traffic to decline, not rise.

China's airspace is already maxed out to capacity, and significantly strained by military drills which often force civilian flights to divert from their normal flight paths. China's domestic flights are already some of the most delayed in the world. Expanding the airports on the ground does nothing to solve the problem of congested air space.

@bilingualexpat
Really? Mandatory swim classes for ALL high school students in Yunnan?
I don't think that's really a priority.

And where are they supposed to take these classes? What high school in Yunnan has its own swimming pool?

If they want to protect the waters of China, they should target the factories dumping waste in waterways and farmers using dangerous chemical pesticides.

I snuck across the border to investigate this myself in 2013 after reading about the wildlife markets in Vice and Time magazine. I'm pretty sure most of the Chinese tourists who go to Mongla are going for the casinos, not the wildlife. The casino complex there (it's about 5km inland, away from the reach of the PLA, and powered by its own power plant after the Chinese cut the power) is HUGE, much bigger in scale than the wildlife market, which was nearly deserted when I was there.

I went to see these paintings in 2013.
Pretty impressive, and the surrounding region is gorgeous.
There was absolutely no tourism there at all, then.
There was a ticket booth, but there was nobody operating it.
I wonder how things have changed since the opening of Cangyuan Airport last year...