Call it "China Cool."
This summer, foreign visitors are increasingly skipping the postcard stops for a taste of the country's tech frontier — watching humanoid robots pour coffee in Shenzhen, then hopping into a driverless car for a ride across town; strapping into a brain-computer headset in eastern China’s Hangzhou that reads their neural signals before wandering off to browse AI-generated art; or flying into Hainan, the southern island of China, just to catch a rocket launch. The Great Wall and the pandas haven't lost their pull, but they're no longer the only reason to book a ticket.
The numbers back up the buzz. China logged a record 22.91 million foreign arrivals in the first half of 2026, up 20.4 percent year on year, with visa-free entries climbing 30.6 percent to 17.8 million — nearly 78 percent of all inbound trips. In Hangzhou, one tour operator reported overseas bookings for AI, robotics and smart-city experiences jumping more than 120 percent year on year, while Shenzhen's "Robot 6S Store" now draws so many international visitors that foreign shoppers account for up to 60 percent of foot traffic at peak times. But tech isn't the only thing pulling travelers off the well-worn track this summer — domestic tourism, too, is being remade around experience rather than sightseeing.
The scale is real. This summer's 62-day national rail travel season, which kicked off on July 1, is expected to carry over 1 billion passenger trips, while domestic airlines are projected to handle another 142 million travelers over the same stretch. Culture is now a core driver of that movement — public institutions hosted roughly 49,400 activities drawing 88 million visits, and live-performance spending rose 17.6 percent.
Villages reimagined
Rural China shows this clearly. Travel to smaller cities is up over 35 percent this summer, county and rural bookings up more than 60 percent, and interest in "heading to counties" rose 63 percent year on year.
Southwest China’s Guizhou serves as a strong example. The province has repaired over 12,000 endangered structures, restoring them in their original style while keeping residents as protagonists rather than props. More than 3,000 homestays and 600 heritage sites have lifted incomes for over 100,000 villagers. Grassroots events like “Village BA” (a local basketball tournament) have become cultural exports almost by accident. In 2025, Guizhou's traditional villages drew over 200 million visitors and generated more than 50 billion yuan (about US$7 billion) in tourism revenue.
When the event becomes the destination
Increasingly, travelers pick the experience first and let the city follow. At Hebei's Zhangbei Grassland Music Festival in northern China, attendees bought local produce directly from farmers, leaving them roughly 3,000 yuan (about US$410) richer per person over the season. A youth lacrosse tournament in Weifang, east China’s Shandong Province, generated 6.42 million yuan (about US$890,000) in local economic impact from a single event, part of a "traveling with sports events" push that earned Shandong over 11.2 billion yuan (about US$1.5 billion) in 2025.
What it adds up to
A ride on a driverless car, a Guizhou homestay, a grassland festival, a lacrosse pitch — the pattern is the same. China's tourism industry is learning to sell belonging, not just places. The landmark photo hasn't disappeared; it's just no longer the whole point.
By Wang Yangyang and Liu Yushan, both worked as CGTN journalists based in Beijing.
