It’s now so much easier to visit China, but Australians remain wary

Hello from Singapore,

For the past few weeks, Chinese Singaporeans have been observing the Hungry Ghost Festival, a month-long age-old tradition anchored in Taoist and Buddhist beliefs.

It is thought that during this month the gates of hell fly open and ghosts enter the realm of the living. It is customary to honour dead ancestors and appease restless souls through rituals such as burning paper money and incense, and leaving food offerings to help usher the souls into the afterlife.

Chinese Singaporeans buy roast duck, pork and crab in preparation for the Hungry Ghost Festival. Credit: Lisa Visentin

I’m lucky to live among a vibrant and friendly Chinese-Singaporean community in a private rental in a government housing estate. Last week, a makeshift food stand appeared at the entrance to the local hawker market, spruiking all the wares needed for a festival feast.

My neighbours were poring over trays of crispy whole roast ducks, slabs of crunchy pork belly, cooked crabs, and the odd deep-fried fish. Spotting my curiosity, an elderly Chinese gentleman told me they were stocking up for the apex of the celebrations, the day when the ghosts are most active, so the tradition says, which this year fell on Sunday – the 15th night of the seventh month of the lunar calendar.

A few feet a way, a giant open-aired steel furnace was white-hot with burning effigies, sending out a radiating wall of heat into the midday Singapore sun, as though we were at the mouth of hell itself.

Visitors to the Forbidden City in Beijing this week included Western faces.Credit: Bloomberg

As the only ethnic Chinese-majority country outside of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, Singapore provides a window into these fascinating traditions and superstitions that began centuries ago on the mainland and have been handed down for generations to the diaspora.

But as of July 1 this year, it is much easier for Australians to witness such festivals and soak up Chinese culture by travelling to China itself. Gone is the tedious visa application process and requirements for letters of invitation and passports to be submitted in advance to a visa approval office.

Instead, you can now more-or-less book a flight, pack your passport and go, providing you stay fewer than 15 days and travel for tourism, businesses or family reunion purposes. This visa-free scheme, which runs until December 31, 2025, was announced during Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Australia earlier this year – part of the same soft diplomacy, “back in the good books” package that secured Adelaide Zoo two new pandas.

So, has there been an explosion of Australian tourism in China?

Visitors gather to see the Forbidden City during sunset at Jingshan Park in Beijing.Credit: Bloomberg

It’s difficult to say, but there are several indications to suggest China is a long way off becoming the jewel of Asia for Australians. And you’ll have to pry many a Bintang from cold dead hands to knock Bali off the top of the travel list.

This year’s annual Lowy Institute survey, which measures Australians’ attitudes towards the world, revealed people continue to harbour low levels (17 per cent) of trust towards China, while 71 per cent think China will become a military threat to Australia in the next 20 years.

This overall negative sentiment was also reflected in polling published by American think-tank Pew Research Center in July. It found 85 per cent of Australians had an “unfavourable” view of China, with just 14 per cent holding a positive view.

Almost two months into the visa-free scheme, there is little hard data available to gauge interest levels. The most recent immigration figures published by the Department of Home Affairs are from the end of May, when just over 12,000 Australians had returned home from a holiday in China. But the department cautions this data may be incomplete, and relies on self-reporting.

Nonetheless, it’s an extremely low starting base – in the same month more than 66,000 Australians holidayed in Japan.

At the Chinese end, the government publishes immigration statistics, which state that 17.2 million foreigners visited the country in the first six months of this year, but doesn’t break it down by country. My queries to the Chinese embassy on the uptake of the visa-free travel went unanswered.

More anecdotally, tour company Intrepid Travel says it has seen a boom in demand for their China tours.

“It was an immediate uptick. Our sales [of China tours] went up 133 per cent just in that week alone,” says Yvette Thompson, Intrepid’s general manager of sales and marketing for Australia and New Zealand.

“China had been off the travel radar for some time. We go to over 100 countries, but now it’s ranking at number 13, and that’s the highest we’ve ever seen it.”

But it is a pretty safe conclusion that the volatile Australia-China relationship, and extensive media coverage of the ever-tightening authoritarian grip of the Chinese state over its citizens under President Xi Jinping has dampened a few appetites.

Not to mention the suspended death sentence that hangs over Chinese-Australian democracy writer Yang Hengjun who is languishing in a Beijing jail. Or the hefty sentence likely awaiting Australian citizen Gordon Ng who is jailed in Hong Kong for his role in a democracy protest that was snuffed out by Beijing’s national security laws. And the treatment of Australian journalist Cheng Lei, who endured three-years in a Beijing jail on vague national security charges before being freed last year after extensive lobbying by Australian officials.

The visa-free travel announcement has given Chinese state media renewed opportunity to paint the Western reporting of China as one-eyed.

“The sense of contrast is the most intuitive feeling of many foreign tourists after enjoying China’s great rivers and mountains and breathing the air of Chinese culture. Some foreign travel bloggers even said that they have been ‘cheated by Western media’,” the state-run Xinhua news agency said in a recent report.

Far from being part of a conspiracy, Australian journalists remain largely confined to reporting the China story through the lens of geopolitics, due to the Chinese government’s decision to deny them entry – bar a few tightly controlled occasions – to report from within the country. The story of China’s rise, its competition with the United States, and its territorial ambitions, is reshaping global politics. It may well be the biggest story of the 21st century, but it’s not the only one.

China is a country of a more than a billion people, its vastness and depth of history and culture are difficult to comprehend from afar. I’d be on a plane tomorrow if I could.

In the meantime, please enjoy this magnificent photo taken by colleague Sanghee Liu in early August of the Perseid meteor shower lighting up the night sky over the Amne Machin mountain range, a sacred Tibetan Buddhist site, in north-west China’s Qinghai Province.

A shooting star lights up the night sky at the Amne Machin Snow Mountain in north-west China’s Qinghai Province on August 4.Credit: Sanghee Liu

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