IT’S TOO POPULAR: China’s Latest Problem: People Don’t Want to Go There.

Foreign travelers’ absence is particularly evident in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where the numbers of foreigners who visited in the first half of the year totaled less than a quarter of comparable figures in 2019, before the Covid pandemic.

Nationwide, just 52,000 people arrived to mainland China from overseas on trips organized by travel agencies during the first quarter, the latest period for which national data is available, compared with 3.7 million in the first quarter of 2019. As in past years, nearly half of the visitors came from the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than farther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.

“The number of visitors from Europe, America, Japan and Korea are all dropping, substantially,” said Xiao Qianhui, a director with the semiofficial China Tourism Association in a speech in May.

Fewer tourists and businesspeople from overseas means fewer opportunities for foreigners to see China with their own eyes and interact with locals, an important factor in reducing geopolitical tensions, experts say.

The dearth of visitors could also be contributing to less investment in China. Foreign direct investment into the country fell to $20 billion in the first quarter, compared with $100 billion in last year’s first quarter, according to an analysis of government figures by Mark Witzke at Rhodium Group, a research firm.

There’s only so much repression, genocide, zero-COVID lockdowns, and social credit restrictions that tourists are really interested in seeing.