China woos tourists with visa-free initiative, but difficulties remain

Geopolitical tensions and limited flights among issues still hurting the industry

- Lim Min Zhang

Since March, when China started to issue tourist visas again, business has picked up for Beijing tour guide Vivie Pan, who organises small group tours for Englishspeaking visitors.

But the numbers are nowhere near the levels of 2018 and 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. Back then, she received up to three or four bookings a day, and had to rope in other guides to help.

"For this year, I have enough bookings only for myself. I was quite busy from June until November almost every day, with three or four rest days per month, but still there's no comparison to 2019," said Ms Pan, who drove part-time for private car-hire company Didi to make ends meet during the pandemic.

"The overseas tourists are coming back, but their main purpose is not sightseeing or leisure - it's usually business or visiting friends." In the first half of 2023, travel agencies received 477,800 inbound tourists, compared with more than 8.56 million for the same period in 2019, according to statistics released by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The sluggish recovery has been on the government's radar it has implemented a series of measures to ease potential pain points of visitors. For instance, in August, the authorities did away with the need for travellers to have a negative Covid-19 test to enter the country.

The latest move came on Nov 24, when China unilaterally announced a year-long visa-free policy for visitors from France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia from Dec 1.

This saves them the hassle of filling up pages of forms that include planned itinerary and travel history.