Visa-Free China: Foreign Tourists Now Come to Shop, and to Work the Fields

On the day China's National Day holiday opened, the item about foreign tourists bubbling up Baidu's trending board was not about crowds at the Great Wall. It was headlined "Foreign tourists have started doing farm work" (外国游客开始下田干活了), and it reported that hauling tea leaves in Yangshuo and watching the autumn crop-drying on the Longji terraces has become this year's most fashionable activity for visitors in China — labour as an itinerary item, booked and photographed like any attraction. Guilin, the prefecture that contains both, counted 1.25 million overnight inbound visitors in the first seven months of the year, up 63.5 percent on 2025.

Official media set the week's expectation in exactly those consumption terms. Xinhua's holiday reading of Reference News carried the headline that Golden Week cultural-tourism consumption "looks set to be hot" (文旅消费火热可期), citing RTHK's report that hotel-booking rates in Beijing were close to full and that the flower beds along the capital's avenues remain a check-in spot in their own right. The inbound surge is the newest strand of that picture.

The scale underneath it is the visa policy. China's unilateral visa-free list now covers 48 countries, and the 240-hour transit visa-free scheme runs through 65 ports of entry, as People's Daily recapped in a post earlier this year; when the meme-phrase "city bu city" went viral in the summer of 2024, the transit scheme covered 37 ports at 144 hours. The numbers followed the doors opening: from January to August, foreigners crossed China's borders 61.29 million times, up 19.5 percent on the year, and 23.72 million of those crossings — 77.6 percent of all inbound foreign travel — used visa-free channels, according to the National Immigration Administration, in figures cited by 36Kr.

What those visitors do once inside has shifted. Shopping, 36Kr's holiday report argued, has moved from a side activity to a stated purpose of the trip — the piece's title renders it as coming to China to "sweep up goods, and tour on the side." The Commerce Ministry counted 263.6 billion yuan of spending by overseas visitors in China from January to July, up 27.8 percent, with the number of foreign travellers applying for departure tax refunds rising alongside it. State media added the sea to the ledger this week: CCTV reported foreign tourists checking into China's large cruise ships as holiday cruise departures climbed.

The through-line is the itinerary, not the headcount. A Dutch visitor interviewed by CCTV in Shaanxi put it plainly: "Traveling to China was on my to-do list" (来中国旅行在我的计划清单上) — and what fills the list now is concrete and physical, tea fields and shopping streets and cruise decks, rather than a circuit of landmarks. When Chinese New Year travellers told People's Daily "I love China! This is my third time here," the repeat visits were the point: the one-off check-in has become a habit.

The contrast with the domestic holiday is instructive. The same week is producing record movement by Chinese travellers themselves, 2.13 billion trips booked against a soft economy, and a rush away from the famous sights toward small county towns — the same search for something real, one cohort foreign and one domestic. For a government trying to talk up consumption in a sluggish season, the fastest-growing spenders on the high streets this week were, by the arithmetic above, the ones who do not live there.