Beijing plays the long game

From Europe’s villages to the grand capitals of London, Paris, and Rome, there’s been an explosion in the number of Chinese tourists, the most visible sign of China’s expanding economic presence in Europe, one both feared and embraced by cash-strapped countries.

It began with a trickle, but now there are huge tour parties and no major city or even fairly picturesque small town in France, Italy, or Britain, the most popular destinations, is immune.

Amazingly, this could be just the beginning. A mere 7 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people have passports, compared to 40 percent of Americans and nearly 80 percent of Europeans. Wolfgang Georg Arlt, director of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, has predicted that international trips by Chinese citizens will increase from 2017’s 145 million to more than 400 million by 2030.

For many, the unfolding influx has its blessings. Near my Italian vacation home deep in the sleepy Lazio countryside an hour north of Rome, the flow of tourists, mostly Chinese, has brought back to life the “dying city” of Civita di Bagnoregio, which dates back to Etruscan times and defies gravity by clinging to a small plateau of progressively eroding volcanic stone, despite frequent landslides.

About 800,000 tourists visited Civita last year, most of them Chinese, prompted to do so by the popular Japanese animator and movie director Hayao Miyazaki, who used the “dying city” as a backdrop for the Oscar-award winning movie, “The Enchanted City.” When the Chinese first appeared, they cut an incongruous sight in northern Lazio, leaving local contadini, or peasants, scratching their heads in astonishment.

The Chinese have transformed the economic prospects of Civita and the commune of Bagnoregio, whose 4,000 residents had long been resigned to their marginalization in the global economy. Native-born youngsters, as in much of the Italian heartland, were leaving in droves. Thanks to a jump in revenue, the municipality has been able to discontinue some local taxes. Even the woman who supervises the public restrooms bows ceremoniously to the visitors and has learned a smattering of Mandarin to make the newcomers welcome.

The number of restaurants in the town has jumped from two to 10. Roberta Mencarelli, the manager of the restaurant/bed and breakfast Romantica Pucci, is rushed off her feet most lunchtimes and, while welcoming the influx, acknowledges there can be some major mutual incomprehension when it comes to ordering. She says some locals “feel the traditional rhythm of life in the town is being disrupted.”

That complaint is echoed loudly in some of Europe’s most famous cities, such as Venice, Barcelona, and Paris. Already overcrowded during the vacation seasons, the surges in the numbers of tourists, boosted significantly by those coming from China and other Asian countries, is affecting quality of life and overstraining infrastructure.

Rapid growth is prompting another kind of alarm. Some see Chinese tourism, and the revenue it brings, as leverage Beijing can wield to influence European governments. Beijing directs tourism flows by granting countries approved destination status. “This designation regulates where Chinese package tour groups are authorized to go and how tours are marketed in mainland China,” according to Stratfor, the geopolitical intelligence company.

This isn’t uninformed speculation. Beijing isn’t shy of using tourism as a tool of statecraft. In 2017, it cut the number of Chinese tourists traveling to South Korea by half to punish Seoul for deploying the U.S.-supplied Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system.

Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.