By relaxing visa rules, Beijing has two things on its mind – boosting its economy and improving its self-imageWalk through central Beijing today and one thing quickly becomes apparent: foreigners are back. They are taking photos outside the Forbidden City and sitting in cafes around Gulou and Sanlitun. The shift
Zichen Wang
Walk through central Beijing today and one thing quickly becomes apparent: foreigners are back. They are taking photos outside the Forbidden City and sitting in cafes around Gulou and Sanlitun. The shift is visible online, too; YouTube is increasingly filled with videos titled “China Shocked Me” or “My First Week in China”. Most of the creators are tourists, not China specialists or journalists, and many of them are encountering the country for the first time.
The resurgence is striking because to many outside observers China’s story has become one of closure and increased security – of intensifying strategic rivalry with the west, expanded anti-espionage enforcement and increasingly constrained foreign reporting, including the withholding and revocation of visas for US journalists. Yet on the ground, another story is unfolding. When it comes to its relationship with the rest of the world, Beijing increasingly appears to be betting on direct exposure: come to China and judge for yourself.
Driving the change is one of the most consequential shifts in China’s external engagement in years: an expanded and upgraded policy for travelling without a visa. From 2023, Beijing started to grant 30-day visa-free entry to ordinary passport holders from 50 countries, including every G7 member except the US, and 25 of the EU’s 27 member states. Its 240-hour visa-free transit policy also now allows eligible travellers from 55 countries, including the US, to spend up to 10 days in large parts of China while travelling onwards to a third destination.
And it’s working. In the first half of 2026, entries and exits across China’s borders once again reached a historic high. Arrivals by foreign nationals rose by 20.6% from a year earlier. Notably, 17.8 million entered without a visa, accounting for 77.7% of the total.
There is a clear economic rationale. With domestic consumption under pressure, inbound tourism offers a welcome boost. But economics alone cannot explain either the scale of the change or its political significance. This is not simply a tourism campaign – it is a new form of opening up.
That choice is especially striking amid a broader global retreat from cross-border openness. As geopolitical rivalry increasingly shapes the movement not only of capital and technology but also of students and travellers, many governments – including that of the US – are making entry more restrictive. Beijing is moving in the opposite direction in one deliberately limited sphere: it is making short-term visits easier, including for citizens of countries with which it has political, ideological or even security tensions.
Perhaps even more interestingly, it is also doing all of this without asking for the same in return. For decades, Chinese diplomacy emphasised reciprocity, but the current approach marks a confident break with that habit. Countries such as the UK and Japan still require visas from Chinese travellers, but British and Japanese citizens do not need visas to visit China.
The wager is straightforward: let visitors encounter a China more complex than the one presented in geopolitical headlines – high-speed trains, mobile payments, dense cities and ordinary people – and hope that while a week-long visit may not erase political disagreements, tourists will leave with a more informed view. For Beijing, that may be enough.
The expansion of visa-free travel has coincided with a recent, broader shift in international opinion: a Pew Research Center survey published this week found that China is now viewed more favourably than the US in most of the 36 countries surveyed, reflecting both improving perceptions of China and worsening views of the US.
For decades, China sought to improve its global image through intermediaries: media organisations, thinktanks, universities and public diplomacy programmes. Despite substantial investment, attitudes in many western countries remained unfavourable, while many Chinese people became sceptical that western media and policy elites would ever interpret China sympathetically. The new approach relies less on institutional gatekeepers. Individuals – including travellers from four members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – can come and see the country for themselves.
At the same time, the influx of visitors is reshaping China’s domestic environment. Public security authorities have ordered hotels to stop refusing foreign guests by claiming that they lack the qualifications needed to receive them. Payment platforms have also made it easier for overseas users to pay through Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. These changes may sound technical, but they matter: the arrival of more foreign visitors is creating pressure to remove stubborn practical obstacles.
This more open approach, however, has clear limits. Beijing is making it easier to visit China but not to work, settle or belong there. Even as barriers to short-term mobility fall, deeper boundaries around residence, employment and information remain intact. This distinction came to the surface when China recently introduced a K visa for overseas graduates: it is supposed to attract young talent in science and technology, and is modest by international standards. But the policy prompted a fierce public backlash online over job competition, alleged preferential treatment for foreigners, and the importation of labour at a time of anxiety about employment and welfare.
The backlash partly rests on an exaggerated sense of China’s attractiveness to foreign workers. The linguistic and cultural barriers are high. Internet restrictions wall China’s digital ecosystem off from global platforms. And welfare and schooling remain difficult for most foreigners to access, while the country’s incomplete transition to a market-led economy limits the careers available to them.
Nor should the return of foreign tourists and vloggers be confused with the return of the old expat community – the long-term presence of Americans and Europeans in the country has not recovered to its pre-pandemic scale. Trade frictions, decoupling, corporate localisation and geopolitical caution have all reduced the number of China-based jobs available to foreign workers.
But while the visa-free experiment will not resolve strategic rivalry or erase disputes over trade, technology and security at a time when many countries are raising barriers, Beijing has chosen, in one important domain, to lower them. China is no longer simply trying to explain itself better. It is becoming more willing to be seen.
Zichen Wang is deputy secretary-general at the Center for China and Globalization, a thinktank in Beijing. This article was co-written by Hao Wu, an assistant professor at the School of International Studies at Peking University
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