Tourism trouble: post-pandemic hurdles of China travel
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You're listening to a podcast from the South China Morning Post. A struggling property market, a grim employment outlook, and provinces that are riddled with debt. These are just some of the many challenges China faces as it tries to revive its economy since strict zero-COVID policies were lifted in 2022. And then there is tourism.

On the domestic front, tourist numbers have steadily recovered, with Chinese nationals projected to make 6 billion trips this year, about the same number as 2019 before the pandemic. Revenue from domestic tourism is also expected to increase this year to 6 trillion yuan, or about US$850 billion, better than it was before COVID-19. International arrivals, however, are expected to take longer to recover.

China has responded to the forecasts by trying to make it easier for foreigners to visit. But are those efforts working? And how much impact do foreign tourists have on the Chinese economy? This is Inside China. I'm Jasmine Tse. Joining me is post-senior political economy correspondent Ralph Jennings.

Ralph, let me first start by asking you, has China's inbound tourism levels returned to pre-pandemic levels? Inbound tourism to China has not returned to pre-pandemic if we're talking about 2019. The numbers are nearly 100 million trips in and out of China for that year. And 2023, they only got to about 36 million, which is, of course, just a little bit more than a third.

And for the 36 million inbound tourists who are coming to China, where are they coming from? A lot of the tourists are coming from countries where China has allowed a degree of better treatment, for lack of a better word. So there are 11 countries in Europe now where the citizens can travel into China visa-free for 15 days. And among those countries are France,

Portugal, Ireland, and they are eager to try it out and it does work. Also, we have Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Citizens of all three of those countries can go to China and they are going. It's pretty close. They can get a flight whenever they want. So it's all happening. And then who isn't visiting China? People who are not visiting China would be people from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and Japan.

For the opposite reason, they are not being given 15-day visa-free treatment at the moment at least. Japan has asked quite vociferously this year to date, and I think even last year, if they could be reinstated because the Japanese used to be able to do it.

So because they still need to apply for a visa, which takes time and money and uncertainty sometimes about whether you'll get it, they're not going as often as they used to. And those countries that you just listed, including the U.S., Canada, Japan, one could say that their governments have a more rocky relationship with China than, say, France or Thailand.

Is that one of the reasons why fewer people from those countries are visiting China because of geopolitics? That's possible. China has never come out and said that, so we don't know for sure what the thinking is, but...

Analysts have told us at SCMP that that's what's going on. And sometimes the tourists say that they kind of they feel that energy. And some of the governments still have travel advisories out against going to China. As the State Department issues a warning recommending Americans reconsider travel plans to China. Officials cited arbitrary law enforcement exit bans and risk of wrongful detention for that. So some citizens take those seriously and will...

make their travel plans accordingly. So earlier you mentioned how China had set up visa waivers for select countries. What else is the Chinese government doing to attract more tourists?

I think there's an effort to make the visa process a little bit easier. I believe the application went from 10 pages or even more to somewhat less, not quite half that, but somewhere between 5 and 10. And then the time required to go into a visa office or to wait for an online appointment, I believe, has been cut. And the specifics depend on the country you're from and the country where you're actually applying for the visa.

Besides getting people to visit China, you also reported how those who do visit China face a separate set of challenges. What did you find? So there are two big challenges. One would be making payments because most of local Chinese people are using two different apps on their phones to pay for almost everything. And they're basically stored value accounts linked to their bank accounts and they can just swipe those across the cash registers of anywhere they go.

and they can order taxis that way, and they can order food that way. They can do almost anything. But if you're coming into it and you don't have those accounts already hooked up, it's pretty hard to get them started, especially if you don't have a Chinese phone number or a Chinese bank account. You can still use cash in China, but some merchants would prefer not to take it, or they can't give you exact change. The other big issue is getting on the international internet.

So a lot of people from other countries are used to using WhatsApp. They're used to using Gmail and all of its attendant G products to communicate. And there are other services, Instagram, Facebook, and all that. If you don't have a VPN set up, you won't be able to use those because China bans its own citizens from using them for the most part.

Some tourists know that before they get in, especially if they're going on business and they have business associates who are already in the country. Some don't, and then they're quite frustrated. They can't make a call back home on WhatsApp or they can't check their Gmail from the hotel. So I don't know of any efforts in China to address that problem. At the moment, there have been a few attempts in the past, but VPNs do work if you know how to get them. And a lot of people do know before they travel.

So back to the e-payments. How do tourists navigate through that system? Do they completely avoid it? Do they just solely rely on cash? Or do they find a way out? A lot of people rely on cash. Some people are lucky enough to stay in large hotels that take international credit cards. Some people do try to set it up and some people successfully do it.

My name is John Chetwin. I talked to a group of American tourists who had varying degrees of luck getting it set up, and one of them was John Chetwin. The trip started off with us gathering about 10 students from the University of San Francisco to visit businesses around Shanghai and Ningboa at the University of Nottingham. John said before heading to China...

He knew he had to download certain Chinese apps. We knew that we had to have multiple different applications and different type of payment methods in order to work with inside the Chinese economy. One of those apps was WeChat. For those who may not know, WeChat is basically an all-in-one platform that combines WhatsApp, Google, Facebook, and Apple Pay.

People can message their friends, order food, conduct business, call a cab, and even pay their bills. But for John, as a foreigner, he had to go through a few hurdles to set up the app. When downloading WeChat, I had to get multiple people to verify I was who I said I was.

And they had to be individuals that had already had WeChat on their system for an extended period of time. John also got Alipay. That's an e-payment app. And just to note, Alipay is owned by Alibaba, which is also the owner of the South China Morning Post.

For John, at first, downloading Alipay seemed to be pretty straightforward. I had then downloaded Alipay and uploaded my card when I was in the United States. And off we went. We hopped on the plane. But turns out that wasn't the case. After he landed in China, he tried to use Alipay. I decided that I'd stop by a local market and try out my mobile payment app on Alipay. He could make the transactions. Which happened to work out just fine. And I was pleased to see that I could see all the fees.

But then he checked his mobile banking app. I realized that I would get late international transaction fees on my mobile banking app in Bank of America. I expected this, but I thought it was kind of funny that I saw multiple charges and they were extremely small fees. After a few more days, this became an issue for my bank and they locked my card. John contacted his bank to try to get his card unlocked. But after retrying my card at multiple different markets,

I was locked out and I was unable to pay for any goods via Alipay or WeChat. So for the rest of the trip, he had to rely on other people to make his purchases. I had to ask my friends and different people that we were on the trip with to utilize their payment system and Venmo them or Zelle them after we had returned from the trip. Because even while I was there, it wouldn't allow me to use those different applications. That's when John told me he also had problems with getting a VPN to work.

So I had the smart idea of possibly using my friend's VPN

And when I went to go try this, it wouldn't allow him on the internet because he had to establish the VPN connection on an internet that allowed him to access different types of sites like Google and things of this nature. This is when our idea sparked to utilize our mobile phone and use roaming because we understand that the satellites probably crossed over those local jurisdictions. So we utilize that roaming connection in order to get access to our applications back home.

This worked for a good while, but then became issues when we were in areas that roaming service wasn't as available. John said that these issues were quite a hassle at the time, but at the end of the day, he found a solution and he's learned some valuable lessons for his next trip to China. Next time, I'll definitely make sure that I have the correct payment systems and even international cards to avoid these types of situations.

And these challenges with e-payments and VPNs, have they hindered any tourists from visiting China? I'm not sure if those two issues alone have kept people out. I think the visa issues have.

But if people can get the visas once they arrive in China or before they go, they will do their due diligence and figure out what they need. And especially if they're traveling on business, they will tap into their brother, sister, parent company that's in China and their co-workers and ask them for advice. Here in Hong Kong, we've also seen our own inbound tourism levels slowly starting to recover.

But one thing that we're still struggling with is getting tourists, especially tourists from mainland China, to spend money because of China's current economic situation. On the flip side, how much are foreign tourists spending in China? I think we're still looking into that question. We being the world of economists and journalists like ourselves, we don't really know for sure because some people go as proverbial backpackers. They don't spend a lot. They stay in cheaper hotels, which are easy to find hotels.

Some people, especially on the business side, they'll stay in a very nice international hotel and they'll go to a conference and they might shell out some money for meals, for domestic travel on airplanes, trains, and so forth as they go. I don't think it goes beyond that. We had one estimate that the average foreign traveler spends 200 to 300 U.S. dollars per day. And this would be on the sightseeing side of things. It's not necessarily for business. Business people might go higher than that.

and how much of a role do tourists play in helping China's economic recovery? I think the sightseers will probably help China to improve its reputation. The more people who go, the more people come back out of China and say, well, I had a great trip. I would go again, and you should go too. They tell their friends and their family and their co-workers to do it. Some of them will take that advice, and then you get more money coming into the sightseeing part of the economy.

I don't know if the actual dollar value will really amount to anything when you compare it to exports and property and investments in fixed assets. However, the reputational improvement could have a knock-on effect, especially when it comes to business people. If the tourists feel safe seeing the Great Wall and places like that, then perhaps the business people will feel like it's safe for them to be in China. It's a hospitable place. And they would go anyway, and probably their contributions to the economy will increase.

far overtake that of the common tourist because they're investing through their companies. That was Ralph Jennings. You can find his latest articles at scmp.com. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

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