By HASAN MUHAMMAD

International visitors spent 263.6 billion yuan, about $39.3 billion, inside China between January and July, 27.8 percent more than in the same period last year. Between July 1 and August 25, more than 131,000 international flights carried over 14.98 million passenger trips in and out of the country, roughly 3 percent above last summer, according to the civil aviation platform Umetrip. In the first half of the year, 22.91 million foreign nationals entered China, up 20.4 percent, and 77.7 percent of them arrived without a visa.

The spending line is the one worth watching. Nearly 50 overseas digital wallets now connect to the cross-border QR gateway the People's Bank of China opened in 2025, which is why a visitor in Shenzhen can pay for the airport taxi, a bowl of noodles in Shekou and a pair of made-to-order spectacles in Huaqiangbei using the app already sitting on the phone from home. No new download, no cash counter, no arithmetic on the exchange rate. Three years of unglamorous engineering went into making that two-second transaction work, and it has done more for inbound spending than any promotional campaign.

Inbound tourism is an export that ships nothing. When a German architect buys custom eyewear in Shanghai, a Chinese firm books a foreign-currency sale at a domestic retail price, with no bill of lading, no port of entry and no tariff line to argue about in Geneva. In a year when Washington and Brussels have spent enormous political capital adjusting duty schedules on Chinese goods, this is the one sales channel their instruments cannot touch.

China ran a travel deficit of $254 billion in 2025, the single largest item in its services shortfall. Chinese students and holidaymakers have long spent far more abroad than foreigners spend inside China. Each visitor who books ten days in Chengdu instead of Kyoto narrows that gap. That is a structural change in how China earns foreign exchange, and it is happening without a single new factory.

The mechanics behind it are deliberate. Unilateral visa waivers now cover roughly 75 countries. The 240-hour transit arrangement lets citizens of 57 nationalities enter through 65 ports and stay ten days, with Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam added on August 20. Since the start of July, the departure tax refund system has run paperless, with spot checks replacing full inspection on small purchases and refunds claimable at a port in a different province from the shop. The earlier round of changes had already cut the minimum purchase to 200 yuan and lifted the cash ceiling to 20,000. Time to issue a refund form fell from fifteen minutes to three. Economists at the University of International Business and Economics have argued that domestic consumption by foreigners does more for an economy than the equivalent value of goods exports, because the money lands in restaurants, hotels and shopfronts rather than in a shipping container.

What visitors buy has shifted too. Personalization is driving it: clothing cut to measure, jewellery, watches and eyewear made to order. At some Shanghai stores, foreign customers now account for more than half the till. Chinese designer labels and consumer electronics have replaced the souvenir jade as the thing people carry home.

Then there is weather, an accidental marketing budget. As heatwaves hit southern Europe, "ChinaCool" started trending on overseas platforms, and European markets made up 30 percent of the top twenty inbound source countries this summer, with bookings up 275 percent year on year. Harbin, Guizhou and the Yunnan highlands are being sold to Europeans on the same logic that once sold Provence to the British.