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The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Thursday that the flow of tourists and business travelers to China has slowed to a trickle, even after the much-touted “reopening” from coronavirus restrictions last winter.
The collapse in tourism is stunning and it seems to be getting worse, which is very bad news for China’s sputtering economy:
Foreign travelers’ absence is particularly evident in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where the numbers of foreigners who visited in the first half of the year totaled less [sic] than a quarter of comparable figures in 2019, before the Covid pandemic.
Nationwide, just 52,000 people arrived to mainland China from overseas on trips organized by travel agencies during the first quarter, the latest period for which national data is available, compared with 3.7 million in the first quarter of 2019. As in past years, nearly half of the visitors came from the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than farther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.
“The number of visitors from Europe, America, Japan and Korea are all dropping, substantially,” said Xiao Qianhui, a director with the semiofficial China Tourism Association in a speech in May.
The problem goes far beyond the loss of tourism income, as the WSJ noted foreign investment is plunging as well, dropping to $20 billion in the first quarter of 2023 from a high of $100 billion in the first quarter of 2022. This would suggest the reduction in travel includes businesspeople and investors who no longer feel the need to visit China to negotiate deals.
Several business travelers and tourists who were once fond of visiting China told the WSJ they no longer felt welcome, due to rising “anti-Western” and “anti-American” attitudes, plus menacing behavior from Chinese government officials.
