Zhou Xin

My Take | China’s extended visa-free tourist stays drive momentum for opening

Its latest foreign-visitor policy shows that China is willing to be pragmatic, rather than adhering strictly to ideologies

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Tourists from Spain in Shanghai. Photo: Xinhua

Zhou Xin

Published: 7:00am, 24 Dec 2024

China has never been so open to foreign visitors: with its latest visa-free transit policy, passport holders from 54 countries can enter China via 60 ports, visit 24 provincial regions, and stay up to 10 days. This comes after Beijing freed citizens from 38 countries from applying for visas when travelling around the country for up to a month.

It is worth noting that half of China’s territory is now open to citizens from developed economies. These include the nation’s most populous areas, its economic and political heartlands, and hundreds of cities. Places still off-limits to visa-free exploration include Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Qinghai, Gansu, as well as Jilin, China’s border province with North Korea.

The unprecedented visa waiver is expected to bring more tourist money to China, as early data showed a surge of interest for trips to the country. Meanwhile, the 10-day visa-free transit policy will also make business trips much easier, which can help bring in trade and investment opportunities.

But more than that, the policy also reflects a subtle shift in Beijing’s thinking: policymakers are a bit concerned, to say the least, about China’s reduced interactions with the rest of the world.

Tourists hike up the Great Wall in Beijing. Photo: Xinhua

After three years of draconian border lockdowns, which formed the pillars of the nation’s “zero-Covid” strategy, Beijing has realised that it might have gone too far in pushing away people from other countries, as well as overseas Chinese. To rectify this, the government has taken various measures, from resumed flights to easier payments services, to attract foreign investors back to the country.

Those policies have worked. The number of foreign-passport holders entering China reached 29 million in the first 11 months of 2024, a hefty increase of 86 per cent from the same period last year. Still, it should be noted that the flow was much thinner than pre-Covid levels. In 2019, China recorded 98 million entries and exits by foreigners, which translated to about 49 million entries.