Resurgent Chinese travel would reset the country’s global image
As well as an expected spike in business trips, the clearest effect of the resumption of large-scale Chinese travel abroad is likely to be a release of pent-up demand for tourism by a vast middle class.
In its pre-COVID prime, the total value of Chinese worldwide travel was roughly the size of Portugal’s gross domestic product, or just over a quarter of a trillion dollars.
The number of Chinese who made trips outside the mainland in 2019 – some 155 million people – represented a population slightly larger than Russia’s. In that same year, Chinese overseas spending on luxury goods was larger than the current $US90 billion ($132 billion) market capitalisation of General Electric.
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Financial Times
Leo Lewis is the Tokyo correspondent for the Financial Times.
