Originally Posted by
tauphi
The amount of money spent by American tourists in China is dwarfed by the amount of money spent by Chinese tourists abroad. So from a purely financial point-of-view there is no incentive for China to open up to tourism.
Of course the border politics is much more complicated than just tourism and it probably doesn't even figure in the calculus of when to reopen.
Originally Posted by
travelinmanS
This is correct. China doesn’t care about foreign tourists and they are making more money due to locking their citizens inside than they would ever make from foreigners coming in as tourists. China ain’t opening for foreign tourists for at least another 2 years. They don’t need them and frankly probably don’t really want them either.
I agree with you guys on this. If you read any of the pronouncements coming out of official channels the concerns from border closures are the impact on academic exchanges (including the difficulty Chinese students are having getting into/back into tertiary schools overseas) and the impact on business involving foreign companies as investors or customers of Chinese companies. I have not read one word about possible negative impact from the lack of foreign tourists.
The digital yuan is PBOC's end run on alipay and wechat pay. The ultimate goal is to replace them so that control is retained by the same authority that oversees banks and all monetary flows. Two years ago analysts estimated monetary flow volume within Alipay and Wechat exceeded the banking system with near zero visibility into that ecosystem by the authorities. That is not going to be allowed to continue.