Beijing is seeing tourism rebound with the strongest cross-border travel flows in five years. It looks like relaxed visa policies and pent-up demand push international mobility back toward pre-pandemic levels. Exit and entry frontier inspection stations in the capital have handled more than 20 million passenger trips so far this year, according to local authorities – already more than recorded across all of 2024, and the highest annual figure since 2020.
The rebound is being driven not just by returning Chinese travellers, but by a sharp rise in foreign arrivals. Foreign nationals accounted for around 30 percent of crossings, with more than 6 million entries and exits logged year to date, a 34.5 percent increase compared with the same period last year.
Officials say visa-free entry policies have been a decisive factor. Around 1.86 million inbound trips were made under visa-free arrangements, nearly double the number seen in 2024, and roughly 60 percent of all foreign entries.
The surge comes as China continues to widen access. Beijing now benefits from mutual visa-exemption agreements with 29 countries, alongside unilateral visa-free entry for citizens of 48 countries across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. At the airport and border level, authorities have introduced online arrival cards and improved on-site guidance, aiming to reduce bottlenecks as traffic volumes climb.
Travel motives point to a broad-based recovery. Close to half of inbound foreign passengers entered Beijing as tourists, while the remainder travelled for business or to visit friends and family. That mix suggests international travel is normalising beyond a narrow sightseeing rebound, with commercial and personal ties re-engaging in parallel.
After several false starts since 2020, the numbers behind the Beijing tourism rebound point to something more durable: international travel returning not as a trickle, but as a steady, diversified flow – helped along by policy choices deliberately designed to lower the friction of coming back.
