GUILIN, China—More than a millennium ago, the Tang dynasty writer Han Yu said of Guilin’s landscape, “The river forms a blue-green silk ribbon, the mountains are like jade hairpins.”
International visitors also tend to spend less in China. She enjoyed the food in China, especially Peking roast duck, and the diversity of scenery, from the skyscrapers of Shanghai to the natural landscape of Yangshuo. Guo Jiehui, a 35-year-old teacher from Shenzhen, recently brought her 9-year-old son to the scenic heart of Guilin for three days. Morgan Stanley expects China’s tourism and travel revenue—a figure that covers domestic and foreign visitors as well as business travelers—to make up 6.7% of the country’s gross domestic product by 2030, compared with 4.8% in 2024. If so, China’s tourism revenue would rise to about $1.8 trillion in 2030 from roughly $1 trillion last year. China received 35 million foreign visitors last year, roughly half as many as the U.S., and international tourists to China spent about $2,200 each, less than two-thirds of what foreign tourists spent in the U.S., according to an analysis by Trip.com, a Chinese online travel platform. Isabelle Heizmann, a 36-year-old from Germany, visited China for the first time as part of a tour group making stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin and Hong Kong. A big draw for her was visa-free travel, which China granted to German passport holders at the end of 2023.
She said she has cut back on buying clothing and the like in recent years but takes a few trips a year to give her son new experiences. “We are willing to invest in travel,” she said. “They travel more, but they spend less money,” said Wu.
Nearly 23 million foreigners entered China in the first half of 2026, up 20% from the same period a year prior, and more than three-quarters of them entered visa-free, according to China’s immigration agency. up 5.4% from the same period last year, their spending was up only 2% to around $478 billion, according to China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism Although Chinese residents made nearly 3.5 billion trips domestically in the first half of 2026. In recent years, China has expanded visa-free entry, although Americans generally still need a visa to visit. Beijing hopes they will bring home favorable impressions, spreading China’s soft power abroad. As for domestic travel, it is growing too—but many Chinese are stingy spenders on the road.
