Opinion | Chinese tourists are on the march, and bringing change wherever they go. Businesses everywhere must ensure they don’t miss the boat

Matthew Doull says travel is a powerful foreign policy tool for China

Growing numbers of outbound tourists will reduce China’s current account surplus, and bring changes in business and technology everywhere they land

Reading Time:3 minutes

Chinese tourists take a selfie outside the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Reuters

Published: 12:15pm, 10 Feb 2019Updated: 1:24pm, 10 Feb 2019

Lunar New Year is said to be the largest annual human migration on the planet. This year, Chinese people returning home to their families, or travelling, are expected to take a total of 2.99 billion trips, up 0.6 per cent from last year.

Such a tide of people will inevitably bring change in all the places they go to, along all the routes they take, and across areas from technology to trade. As such, travel is a powerful foreign policy tool for China.

The annual holiday exodus is a small part of a bigger trend. The Chinese took 5 billion domestic trips in 2017, and 71.3 million trips abroad in the first half of 2018, yet only around 6 per cent of them hold passports. So there is huge scope for the number of outbound Chinese tourists to grow, and their impact to increase.

To start with, there is the money they spend. In its long history, China has almost always had a bigger domestic market than any other economy in the world. And over the past half a century, its transformation into a consumer market and the world’s factory has coincided with insatiable Western demand for Chinese products, leading to a colossal trade imbalance and the accumulation of dollars in Chinese hands.

In 2017, 130 million Chinese tourists spent US$115 billion overseas, according to official data, or about US$900 each.

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