While I agree with you in the general sense (i.e. cities are morphing into shopping malls), interesting and rural is never far away.

I got lost in the area pictured below last weekend, and it's less than 10 miles from where I live.
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...6be9fb6d17.jpg

There were also street vendors selling live pigeons and the like.

This stuff may interest you and a few others, but it ain't going on any China tourist brochure

I think interest in traveling to China for pure tourism (not business or visiting family) was declining before the pandemic. COVID and other recent events have accelerated the trend. From a PR perspective, nothing China projects today indicates it is a country that welcomes foreign visitors while other countries are actively marketing to overseas tourists.

The lack of interest in China tourism from the US-aligned west is a direct result of the trade/tech war and an aspect of decoupling. The saturation of negative China coverage in Five Eyes media that started in 2018 when the trade war started accomplished its intended effect.

China's reactions do not help, of course, but China did not start the decoupling.

Things started changing markedly in 2013 in concert with China's drive to be more self sufficient via top down policies. While I don't think killing off inbound tourism was ever a stated goal in Zhongnanhai, promoting it hasn't been a priority in either.

The figures for HK are misleading. The 40% calculation is done using the first five months of 2023. The border between China and HK was only opened in February and Covid measures in HK weren't removed until March. You need to look at the numbers for April and May to get a better sense of where things are.

HK May number is 56%, but in May there were no Chinese group travelers to Japan (Chinese tourists accounted for almost of 1/3 of visitors in 2019), so Japan's recovery would've been even stronger (easily 80%+)
https://www.discoverhongkong.com/con...Arrivals-E.pdf

HK is suffering and will continue to suffer from being viewed by many potential tourists as just another Chinese city now. In addition, many people used HK as a gateway to the mainland even up to 2019 when making a business trip (although admittedly much less than in the early 2000's); they'd stop in HK for a few days before or after their trip to the mainland. Now, with business travel to China not really booming, I'd expect HK to suffer from this as well.

Japan is set up for a much stronger future as a tourist destination than either the mainland or HK.

Why?

Other Asian tourist prefer visiting Japan over China by a wide margin. I expect this to continue and the increasing interest from western tourists in Japan to also continue going forward.

China will need to really go on a charm offensive to win back foreign tourists. Right now they don’t seem to have any interest in doing so and they are also currently overwhelmed with domestic tourism so maybe the need isn’t so great either.

It's hard to know what's what in China. Some news reports are that domestic travel has more than completely recovered yet the airlines continue to lose money. China Big 3 lose 1.5-2.0 billion $ in first half 2023 At least the losses are declining.

They must be hurting because of the lack of international revenue. Domestically there's only so much they can charge as they have competition from HSR, etc.

I don't know. If I owned a restaurant or hotel, my target customers would be the types of Chinese people that order everything on the menu and my most expensive wines.

Huh?
We're discussing the big thee Chinese Airlines (CA, MU, CZ), not hotels or restaurants. :rolleyes:

Oops, my bad. What are the Chinese airlines missing other than Canada and the US? Everything else seems to be humming along nicely.