By Fu Ting with AP
Published on
Travellers from dozens of countries – including much of Europe – can now enter China without a visa, as the country opens up in a bid to revive tourism.
Citizens from 74 countries can now enter China for up to 30 days without a visa, a big jump from previous regulations.
The government has been steadily expanding visa-free entry in a bid to boost tourism, the economy and its soft power. More than 20 million foreign visitors entered without a visa in 2024 – more than double from the previous year, according to the National Immigration Administration.
“This really helps people to travel because it is such a hassle to apply for a visa and go through the process,” Giorgi Shavadze, a Georgian living in Austria, said on a recent visit to the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.
China’s tourism industry gears up after years of slow recovery
While most tourist sites are still packed with far more domestic tourists than foreigners, travel companies and tour guides are now bracing for a bigger influx in anticipation of summer holidaymakers coming to China.
“I’m practically overwhelmed with tours and struggling to keep up,” says Gao Jun, a veteran English-speaking tour guide with over 20 years of experience. To meet growing demand, he launched a new business to train anyone interested in becoming an English-speaking tour guide. “I just can’t handle them all on my own,” he said.
After lifting tough COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, China reopened its borders to tourists in early 2023, but only 13.8 million people visited in that year – less than half the 31.9 million in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.
30-day entry for many in Europe
In December 2023, China announced visa-free entry for citizens of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia. Almost all of Europe has been added since then.
Travellers from five Latin American countries and Uzbekistan became eligible last month, followed by four in the Middle East. The total will grow to 75 on 16 July with the addition of Azerbaijan.
About two-thirds of the countries have been granted visa-free entry on a one-year trial basis.
For Norwegian traveller Øystein Sporsheim, this means his family would no longer need to make two round-trip visits to the Chinese embassy in Oslo to apply for a tourist visa – a time-consuming and costly process with two children in tow. “They don’t very often open, so it was much harder,” he said.
Europeans driving a tourism rebound
“The new visa policies are 100 per cent beneficial to us,” said Jenny Zhao, a managing director of WildChina, which specialises in boutique and luxury routes for international travellers. She said business is up 50 per cent compared with before the pandemic.
While the United States remains their largest source market, accounting for around 30 per cent of their current business, European travellers now make up 15–20 per cent of their clients – a sharp increase from less than 5 per cent before 2019, according to Zhao.
“We’re quite optimistic,” Zhao said. “We hope these benefits will continue.”
Trip.com Group, a Shanghai-based online travel agency, said the visa-free policy has significantly boosted tourism. Air, hotel and other bookings on their website for travel to China doubled in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year, with 75 per cent of the visitors from visa-free regions.
No major African country is eligible for visa-free entry, despite the continent’s relatively close ties with China.
Transit stays offer another option for non-eligible countries
Those from 10 countries not in the visa-free scheme have another option: entering China for up to 10 days if they depart for a different country than the one they came from. The policy is limited to 60 ports of entry, according to the country’s National Immigration Administration.
The transit policy applies to 55 countries, but most are also on the 30-day visa-free entry list.
It does offer a more restrictive option for citizens of the 10 countries that aren’t: the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Sweden, Russia, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Indonesia, Canada, the United States and Mexico.
Aside from the United Kingdom, Sweden is the only other high-income European country that didn’t make the 30-day list.
Ties with China have frayed since the ruling Chinese Communist Party sentenced a Swedish bookseller, Gui Minhai, to prison for 10 years in 2020. Gui disappeared in 2015 from his seaside home in Thailand but turned up months later in police custody in mainland China.
