Biden admin to China: Hands off our tech but we’ll take your tourists
Spending by Chinese visitors to the U.S. is still a fraction of what it was before the pandemic.
The Biden administration has a message for Chinese tourists: Please come back. Even as as anti-China rhetoric ratchets up in the U.S., and Washington and Beijing butt heads on everything from trade restrictions to relations with Taiwan, the U.S. is laboring to lure back travelers and students from China after a precipitous drop since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The economic impact would be substantial: “If we just return to the 2019 levels of Chinese visitors to the U.S, that would generate $30 billion in GDP and more than 50,000 additional American jobs,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters recently before heading to China for high-level talks.
Raimondo is the point person for the Biden administration’s efforts, which included an Aug. 29 meeting with China’s Culture and Tourism Minister Hu Heping, where they agreed to hold the 14th U.S.-China Tourism Leadership Summit in China in the first half of next year, the first such gathering since 2019 in Seattle. The two sides are now discussing arrangements for the summit, although neither Raimondo nor Heping have yet committed to attending.
But Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, praised the development as a positive step for the bilateral relationship, which hit a low point earlier this year after the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon traversing U.S. airspace.
