The announcements drew a few paragraphs of wire copy and little else. But they mark the latest step in what has quietly become one of the decade’s biggest travel stories: China is reopening at a pace and scale most Western travelers still haven’t registered. In the first half of 2026, China recorded 22.91 million entries by foreign nationals, up 20.4% year on year, according to the National Immigration Administration. More striking is the composition: 17.8 million of those arrivals — 77.7% of the total — entered visa-free, a 30.6% increase.
The top ten source markets — South Korea, Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, the United States, Japan, Mongolia and Australia — accounted for 62% of arrivals, a genuinely global spread that refutes the idea that only regional neighbors are coming.