From new entry policies to the digital revolution in travel, from high-speed railway routes to the landscapes of the Himalayas, China is experiencing one of the greatest tourism transformations in its contemporary history.

For many years, China was perceived by Western travellers as a destination that was both magnetic and distant. An immense, highly civilised and multilayered place, but also one that was complex to travel through. Its geographical scale, the linguistic distance, the strength of its cultural and political system, and the specific nature of its social and digital codes often turned travel to China into a desired experience, but one approached with caution.

China Tourism is entering a new era as simplified entry policies, high-speed transport and cultural experiences make one of the world’s oldest civilizations increasingly accessible to international travellers.

Today, something is changing profoundly. China is once again presenting itself to the world as a major cultural destination of the twenty-first century. After the years of closure and slowdown caused by the pandemic, the country has begun a gradual policy of reopening, simplifying entry procedures, expanding visa exemptions, improving services for foreign visitors and investing in a tourism narrative that is more accessible, more experiential and more international.

Tourism thus becomes part of a broader dialogue. Contemporary China appears to be reaffirming an ancient vocation: to be a threshold between different worlds. A place where East and West have met through trade, journeys, translations, misunderstandings, wonders, intellectual exchanges and mutual transformations. In this sense, tourism becomes much more than an economic sector. It becomes a form of cultural diplomacy.

Visitors arriving today in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Chengdu, Hangzhou or Shenzhen encounter a country that is far richer and more complex than the stereotypes accumulated over the decades. The Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the Terracotta Army remain absolute icons of the Chinese imagination, but alongside them emerge high-speed trains, digital payments, vertical metropolises, the ethnic villages of Yunnan, Tibetan monasteries, the karst landscapes of Guilin, the suspended mountains of Zhangjiajie and the ancient caravan cities along the Silk Road.

It is a plural civilisation, composed of many geographies of the soul. Travelling through China means continually passing from one sensation to another. There is the almost physical sense of wonder before the monumental scale of Beijing, where spaces seem to have been built to remind humankind of the measure of history. There is the lucid energy of Shanghai, with its lights reflected on the water and that perception of a future that has already happened. There is the spiced slowness of Chengdu, where time seems to stretch between a cup of tea, the steam from a street kitchen and the unhurried pace of the city parks. There is the suspension of Guilin, where the karst mountains emerge from the water like pictorial apparitions. There is the vertigo of Zhangjiajie, with its columns of rock that seem to belong to a vertical mythology. Every atmosphere produces a different way of breathing the country.

There is imperial China, where power was expressed for centuries through ceremonial axes, monumental gates, palaces, gardens, temples and walls. There is mercantile China, crossed by land and maritime routes that connected the Mediterranean, Central Asia, India and the Pacific. There is spiritual China, made up of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, local cults, sacred mountains and pilgrimages. There is technological China, which has transformed the smartphone into a key providing access to mobility, payments, translation, booking and everyday life. And there is a slower, rural China, in which the relationship with the guest still preserves forms of attentiveness, respect and curiosity that escape the standardised logic of global tourism.

For European travellers, and particularly for the Italian travel trade, this new phase represents a major opportunity. China is a system of itineraries, climates, cultures, landscapes and imaginaries that requires careful planning. It can be presented as a historical journey, a railway experience, a gastronomic immersion, a spiritual itinerary, a discovery of ethnic minorities, an urban exploration of the future, or a return to the paths of Marco Polo and the Silk Road. The decisive point is this: China is travelled through more than it is visited.

China’s reopening to international tourism arises from a gradual strategy developed on several levels: visas, transit, payments, mobility, cultural promotion, infrastructure, digital services and international marketing.

One of the clearest signs is the extension of visa-free policies. In recent years, China has expanded the possibilities of visa-free entry for numerous countries, introducing or strengthening measures designed to make travel for tourism, business, family visits, cultural exchanges and transit easier. The most symbolic measure is the visa-free transit programme lasting up to 240 hours, or ten days: a formula that transforms a stopover into a genuine travel experience.

This change is particularly significant. For a long time, entry bureaucracy was one of the elements perceived as most complex by Western tourists. The new policy signals a clear intention: to reduce friction, multiply opportunities to visit, encourage short circuits, combined itineraries and gradual entries into the country.

For the travel trade, this transformation opens up new possibilities. A ten-day stay can become a complete route: Beijing and Xi’an, Shanghai and Hangzhou, Chengdu and Leshan, Guilin and Yangshuo, or an initial taste of the Silk Road between Xi’an and Dunhuang. China thus also enters the logic of the modular destination, which can be constructed according to segments, experiences and successive access points.

Tourism policy is also part of a broader vision. China is building it through a combination of pragmatism and soft power. On the one hand, it facilitates entry, improves payments and strengthens connections. On the other, it enhances its cultural heritage, its urban modernity and its organisational capacity. The implicit message is powerful: China wants once again to be travelled through, studied, photographed and narrated.

China is making its system easier to understand while preserving the strength of its distinctiveness. Tourists arriving in the country encounter a destination that is learning to translate itself more effectively, make its tools more accessible and reduce the practical barriers that could previously make the experience more complex. This translation takes place through airport services, payment apps, signage, tourism platforms, promotional campaigns, museums, urban routes, digital guides and regional programmes dedicated to foreign visitors.

Chinese civilisation is distinguished by extraordinary institutional continuity. The first city-states became centres of aggregation and then nuclei of imperial administration; dynasties succeeded one another, but many bureaucratic, ceremonial and cultural practices found a thread of cohesion that runs through the millennia.

The heart of this continuity can be understood in the choice of capitals: the seat of government was conceived as an energetic node in relation to nature, sacred mountains and geomantic axes. The courts codified rituals that linked power to cosmological legitimacy: the sovereign recognised as the centre of the system and guardian of the Mandate of Heaven.

In the great capitals, power takes form. The Forbidden City is a ritual theatre that organises political time; the principal axes of the cities engage in dialogue with Confucian cosmography; the walls mark sacred boundaries. Imperial architecture translates the language of heaven into urban plans: perfect axes, successive courtyards, stairways and thresholds that organise the sequence of roles. Fortifications and the Great Wall become symbolic surfaces, lines that tell of psychological boundaries and histories of defence, control, identity and protection.

Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism coexist and intersect within the ritual practices that have shaped sacred mountains, temples and monasteries. Places such as Mount Wutai or Mount Hua are theatres of pilgrimage where religious communities, iconographic traditions and ascetic practices are forged. The Shaolin monasteries, Buddhist sanctuaries and Taoist temples tell of a China in which the sacred and the everyday engage in dialogue.

Within the visitor experience, the auditory and tactile dimensions are decisive: prayers, bells, chants, worn surfaces, carved steps, ancient wood and stones polished by the passage of people. Cultural travel in China concerns not only the sight of monuments, but also the perception of the gestures that once inhabited them.

The culture of memory takes monumental and material forms. The imperial tombs, the Terracotta Army of Xi’an and the archaeological layers of Luoyang reveal a care for the past expressed through great funerary installations and an art history that links power and memory. Alongside the monumental dimension, writing and calligraphy are instruments of cultural preservation: calligraphy is a moral practice, an exercise connecting body and thought. Recent museums have reinterpreted this heritage through contemporary exhibition languages, transforming artefacts thousands of years old into accessible and engaging experiences.

The Silk Road is one of the great foundational images of the relationship between China and Europe. It was not a single road, but a network of exchanges connecting China with Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. The first section, leading towards Gansu, is the point of transition where imperial China begins to open outwards.

Goods were accompanied by ideas, technologies and religions: from Buddhism imported from India to decorative motifs circulating among artisans, from techniques to stories, from maps to beliefs. Silk, spices, paper, porcelain, images and knowledge travelled along land and maritime routes, transforming the civilisations they encountered.

In European memory, Marco Polo remains the most powerful symbol of this attraction. His journey to the Mongol court and imperial China helped to construct an imaginary destined to endure for centuries: China as a place of wonder, wealth, order, distance and sophistication. The phrase attributed to Marco Polo, “I have not told even half of what I saw,” still works today because it conveys the deepest feeling of travelling in China: the impossibility of exhausting it.

Contemporary China recovers this vocation for connection and transforms it through new tools. Where there were once caravans, today there are high-speed trains, airport hubs, digital platforms, logistics corridors, universities, trade fairs, cultural exchanges, MICE tourism and major international events. The substance retains a profound continuity: travel as an infrastructure of mutual knowledge.

For Europe, and particularly for Italy, this dimension has an extremely powerful symbolic value. Venice, Genoa, Rome, the Mediterranean trade routes, the memory of Marco Polo and the imaginary of the East continue to provide a powerful narrative framework. A Chinese itinerary created for the Italian public can work on a double nostalgia: that of the dreamed-of East and that of a mercantile, curious and exploratory Europe capable of building bridges.

China is also a historical mirror. It reminds us that European identity was formed through the desire for Asia, through its goods, its images, its stories and its routes.

Every major opening to tourism is also a form of diplomacy. Tourism changes the reputation of countries because it produces direct experience. It makes it possible to see what political, media or economic communication often flattens. In China, this element is particularly important because the country is often described abroad through geopolitical, industrial or strategic categories: power, competition, technology, trade, security and control.

Travel introduces another level. Those who travel through China discover a society made up of everyday rituals, families in parks, elderly people practising tai chi, young people living in hyper-technological cities, food markets, calligraphy, regional cuisines, active temples, extremely efficient railway stations, preserved or reconstructed historic districts, major museums and natural landscapes of almost mythological scale.

This experience makes China a real, inhabited, contradictory and sophisticated place. A territory of human encounter in which great history intertwines with everyday life. For this reason, tourism has strategic value. It allows China to communicate what it is: a long, proud, plural and technologically advanced civilisation that is still deeply rooted in ancient forms of social behaviour.

The relationship with the guest is one of the most delicate aspects of this experience. Chinese hospitality is often expressed in measured, codified forms, attentive to respect for roles and to the quality of the relationship. Visitors can perceive it in the details: in practical advice, in a gesture that provides direction, in a carefully prepared table, in a gift, in a cup of tea, in the attention paid to the guest’s position and in a willingness demonstrated through actions rather than words.

Encountering Chinese hospitality requires attentiveness. It often appears as a sequence of small gestures: a place chosen at the table, a dish offered several times, directions given patiently, a cup refilled before it is empty, an attentiveness that prevents the guest from feeling out of place. It is a form of care that is understood slowly, by entering into the rhythm of the relationship.

The concept of relationship, or guanxi, remains central to Chinese culture. It indicates a network of trust, reciprocity, attentiveness and responsibility. The concept of mianzi, often translated as “face” or social reputation, also helps to explain many dynamics of hospitality: avoiding embarrassment, protecting the dignity of others, maintaining harmony and preserving a respectful relationship.

Tea is one of the country’s great cultural keys. It is a grammar of encounter. Sitting down over tea means slowing down, observing, listening and entering into a relationship that is not immediately verbal. For experiential tourism, this element is fundamental because it makes it possible to transform a visit into a living cultural scene. The China opening up to international tourism offers monuments, landscapes and infrastructure, but also codes of relationship.

The main difficulty in describing China is its scale. The country is immense and functions as a collection of worlds: geographical, linguistic, gastronomic, climatic, religious, architectural and urban.

Every city, province and region opens up a different interpretation of China. Beijing introduces the grammar of imperial power; Xi’an, the memory of the caravan routes; Shanghai, cosmopolitan modernity; Shenzhen, the speed of innovation; Chengdu, gastronomic slowness and Sichuan culture; Guilin, landscape painting transformed into real geography; Yunnan and Guizhou, ethnic plurality; Tibet and Xinjiang, the frontier, spiritual and geopolitical dimension; Hangzhou, the refinement of the cultivated landscape, tea, gardens and water.