Foreign visitors take selfies at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing on June 17. CHEN QIANG/FOR CHINA DAILY

China has largely cleared the primary hurdles to reviving its inbound tourism. Through a steady expansion of visa-free policies, optimized payment solutions, and streamlined tax refund procedures, China has made it easier than ever for foreign visitors to enter and travel.

However, as arrivals surge, the focus of policymakers and industry business leaders is shifting. The challenge is no longer just getting visitors through the door. It is ensuring they can stay longer, travel to more places and leave with experiences worth sharing.

The shift reflects Beijing's broader push to promote high-quality service sector development and strengthen the service sector as a new driver of economic growth.

Xu Guangjian, a professor at Renmin University of China's School of Public Administration and Policy, said expanding exports of travel services is an integral part of China's drive toward high-standard opening-up.

Developing inbound tourism has emerged as a new growth driver for China to expand its travel service exports and boost inbound consumption. While fueling domestic consumer spending, it will effectively optimize the country's trade structure and help accelerate the narrowing of the services trade deficit.

Data from the Ministry of Commerce underscore that momentum. China's travel service exports surged 32.3 percent year-on-year to 105.35 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) in the first quarter of 2026, the fastest growth among all service export categories.

In 2025, China recorded 82.04 million foreign arrivals, a 26.4 percent year-on-year increase, data from the National Immigration Administration show. Visa-free entries surged nearly 50 percent to 30.08 million, highlighting the impact of relaxed entry policies.

Spending by inbound tourists on dining, accommodation, transport, sightseeing, shopping and entertainment all counts toward China's travel service exports. The category reached 393.98 billion yuan in 2025, a 49.5 percent year-on-year increase and 1.6 times the 2019 level, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

The policy push continues to widen. In March, nine government departments including the Ministry of Commerce, jointly released measures to promote travel service exports and expand inbound travel and consumption. The policy package covers tourism, business travel, education, healthcare, culture and sports, reflecting a growing effort to integrate inbound tourism into China's broader services-trade strategy.

More recently, six ministries unveiled upgraded departure tax refund rules aimed at reducing processing times, expanding refund outlets and digitizing procedures. Beginning Wednesday, tax refund processing for most eligible purchases becomes largely paperless, while the authorities will expand nationwide recognition of "buy now, refund now" programs.

"We used to sell Chinese products to the world. Now it is time to sell China's services and experiences to the world," said Liang Jianzhang, co-founder and executive chairman of the board at Trip.com Group, China's largest online travel agency.

The company recently announced plans to invest 15 billion yuan over five years to market China as a travel destination globally with large-scale overseas marketing campaigns, influencer partnerships and destination promotion initiatives, while targeting to bring as many as 200 million inbound visitors to China over the same period.

A self-service retail kiosk offers local souvenirs for foreign tourists in Beijing on June 1. JU HUANZONG/XINHUA

While hard barriers like visas continue to fall, shortcomings in the visitor experience are becoming more apparent.

A 2025-26 tourism development report published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and its tourism research center identified payment services, information access and transportation as key areas requiring further improvement.

The most significant of these challenges is what some experts describe as a "reverse digital divide".

China's digital ecosystem is among the world's most advanced, but many services were designed primarily around domestic users.

Shao Zhiqing, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, China's top advisory body, said the country's digital identity infrastructure was originally built around a single national identification system and has yet to fully accommodate multiple forms of foreign documentation.

From purchasing high-speed rail tickets to reserving attractions, using shared bicycles or registering at hotels, many travel services increasingly rely on mobile applications that assume users possess Chinese identification credentials, said Shao, who is also chairman of the Shanghai Committee of China Zhi Gong Party.

"The issue is not whether digital services exist, but whether international visitors can access them as easily as domestic users," Shao said.

Progress is being made. In May, Tencent's cross-border platform Ten-Pay Global and US fintech firm PayPal announced a payment-interoperability agreement, allowing international PayPal users to make purchases directly across Weixin Pay's vast merchant network in China.

Analysts described the move as an important step toward addressing one of the most common frustrations among foreign visitors: difficulty navigating China's highly digitalized payment ecosystem.

Beyond digital services, foreign tourists frequently cite inconsistent English-language signage, varying hotel reception practices and uneven service quality across destinations.

Yao Xin, secretary-general of the commercial sub-council of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, said many recurring problems arise because China lacks a unified service-standard framework covering the entire visitor journey.

Multilingual signage, ticketing systems, accommodation procedures and tourism information services are often managed by different authorities and implemented unevenly across regions, he said.

"Many places have services, but not standards," Yao said.

Shanghai has emerged as one example of how greater coordination can improve the visitor experience. According to Wang Zhihua, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism, the city has coordinated 15 government departments to implement more than 60 measures covering customs clearance, transportation, accommodation, payments and tax refunds.

The city received 9.36 million inbound visitors in 2025, up 39 percent year-on-year, while tourism foreign-exchange revenue rose 33 percent to $14.8 billion, both hitting record highs.

For many economists, inbound tourism has become a test of China's broader institutional opening-up.

Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy, argues that fragmented governance remains one of the biggest constraints.

He said inbound tourism involves the immigration authorities, transport agencies, telecommunications providers, financial institutions, tourism regulators and local governments, yet coordination among them often remains incomplete.

As a result, foreign visitors can still encounter what Dai describes as a service system with "multiple faces", where individual segments improve, but the overall experience remains inconsistent.

Yang Ruilong, a professor at Renmin University of China, said addressing these problems requires more than technical upgrades.

China ultimately needs a more open service framework capable of accommodating overseas passports, international payment methods and multilingual digital services, he said.

"The deeper issue is a transition from systems designed around administrative convenience to systems designed around user experience," Yang said.

That transition may prove critical if China hopes to unlock the full economic potential of inbound tourism.

Liang estimates that if China can triple inbound visitor numbers and increase per-capita spending by 60 percent to 70 percent over the coming years, the sector could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in additional foreign-exchange earnings.

China's inbound tourism revenue currently accounts for less than 1 percent of GDP, well below levels seen in major tourism economies such as France and Thailand, suggesting substantial room for growth, he said.

编辑：韩睿