A group of tourists from the US is currently on a special themed tour of China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA), designed to offer Americans an “immersive experience of a technologically advanced, safe, open and vibrant China,” mainland Chinese media reports.
Organised by the China National Tourist Office and the US Tour Operators Association, the tour departed from Los Angeles on an Air China flight on Sunday and will feature stops in Macao, Hong Kong and Shenzhen – as well as Beijing. Media reports did not mention how big the group was, or what its members planned to do in Macao.
One of the travellers, Byron Lorenz, told Xinhua that this was his first visit to China. “I am looking forward to enjoying Chinese culture, exploring local tours, and doing some shopping,” he said. Lorenz added that he believed in-person travel was the best way to understand a new culture.
The Global Times reported that the GBA tour – the first of its kind – followed the rollout of a tourism campaign dubbed “Hello! China” launched by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
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Gao Lingyun, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times that the tour’s travel destinations were “symbolic” in the sense that they presented China’s traditional culture and modern urban life – as well as the country’s growing tech prowess.
“There’s a gap between some Western media outlets’ narratives about China and the real China,” Gao noted. “The trip will help remove this information asymmetry and build trust, thereby injecting new vitality into people-to-people exchanges and bilateral pragmatic cooperation.”
While US citizens were not included in China’s recent visa-free policy shift (announced in waves across 2024 and 2023), they were part of last December’s visa-free transit extension. This granted passport holders from many countries the right to spend up to 10 days in the Chinese mainland, so long as they travelled to a third country or region afterwards.
Macao and Hong Kong both counted as third regions, meaning Americans currently on the GBA-themed tour could theoretically spend longer than 10 days on their trip in total, even if they didn’t apply for Chinese visas in advance.
