China is opening its doors to the world’s tourists with interest driven high via social media, while quietly shutting the gates out on its AI elite.
China is pursuing an increasingly bifurcated travel policy in 2026, simultaneously rolling out the welcome mat for international tourists while tightening the restrictions on its most strategically valuable tech and AI professionals and their families.
On September 15, new exit-and-entry regulations took effect, empowering authorities to bar citizens deemed a threat to “industrial or technological security” from leaving the country . The rules explicitly link China’s export control regime to immigration administration, allowing commerce authorities to impose exit bans of six months to three years on individuals who may violate technology transfer regulations.
Days later, Bloomberg reported that Beijing had expanded these restrictions to encompass the families of top AI professionals in private firms. Spouses and children of certain AI and chip executives are now required to obtain approval before travelling abroad, even for short trips. This marks a significant broadening of curbs that already applied to figures at Alibaba and DeepSeek since earlier this year.
The measures follow Beijing’s dramatic intervention in Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup with Chinese roots. In March, Manus co-founders were reportedly barred from leaving China pending regulatory review.
Yet while China locks its gates from the inside for tech talent, it is throwing them open for tourists from both traditional markets and new ones. Despite wider geopolitical tensions, the Middle East and China have openly been courting each other in tourism exchange for the past few years. The “Nihao! China” pavilion at Dubai’s Arabian Travel Market in September showcased 28 culture and tourism enterprises across eight provinces: the largest Chinese delegation in years.
That promotional push is backed by hard numbers. China processed a record 369 million cross-border trips in the first half of 2026, up 10.8 per cent year-on-year . Foreign nationals accounted for 45.9 million trips, a 20.6 per cent increase, with visa-free entries surging 30.6 per cent to 17.8 million. The top source countries were South Korea, Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, the US, Japan, Mongolia and Australia.
The summer saw “China Cool” trend on overseas social media, with European bookings surging as heatwaves swept the continent. From January to July, international visitors spent 263.6 billion yuan ($39.3 billion) in China, up 27.8 per cent year-on-year.
The dual approach reflects a calculated distinction: tourists bring revenue and soft power; but the country’s AI engineers carry know-how that Beijing believes could tilt the balance of technological supremacy. For China’s tech elite, the message is clear: their talents are assets too valuable to risk losing abroad.
