No more US jaunts for Chinese officials
Print Edition
ALMOST every year for more than a decade, tour group operator Carson Zhang has guided a delegation of about two dozen Chinese government officials from Guangdong Province’s Forestry administration for a two-week trip through the national parks of California, Tennessee and Georgia.
Along with presentations about forest fires and trail preservation, the officials enjoyed lobster and steak dinners, went to see Tennessee bluegrass musicians perform, and made a stop at a shopping mall in California’s Orange County.
Zhang’s company, American Carson International, catered almost exclusively to government tour groups from Guangdong. But in the past couple of years, official tourism from there has been scaled back, and the forestry group has not visited the US since 2012, Zhang said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption, which began almost two years ago, has had a profound impact in China itself. Luxury goods sales have suffered, officials now shun lavish banquets, and gambling revenue at casinos in Macau have been sinking. Even sales of boxes of cookies and cakes around holiday times have been hit.
It is also hurting a specialized niche of the US tourism industry.
In some parts of China there are new restrictions on the kinds of overseas travel by central and local government officials that will be allowed, according to officials in several Chinese cities and US companies who handle travel arrangements for government trips.
Xinhua news agency reported in January that the number of government officials who traveled overseas for training approved by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs fell by 32 percent in 2013. The administration approves official trips below ministerial level.
International “training” trips, meant to help Chinese officials learn about business and government practices in other countries, are not only less frequent, they are also shorter and there is a lot less room for leisure time.
For many years after China first began opening up in the late 1970s, much of the tourism to the US and other Western countries was from official delegations, and a cottage industry of tour operators grew up to serve them.
Groups of government officials would often have an official schedule that left plenty of room for sightseeing.
“In the past, most of these trips have been one day of official business and 10 days of travel,” said Sage Brennan, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based consulting group Luxury China Advisors, which consults clients such as luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman and the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board on how to attract Chinese consumers. “Those kinds of trips have disappeared.”
Brennan estimates officially sanctioned Chinese government travel to the US fell by as much as 90 percent in the first half of 2013.
In recent years, the balance has swung more toward private tour groups and individual tourism, more than offsetting the drop off in official trips.
Indeed, Chinese tourists visiting the US in July jumped 22 percent over July 2013, according to the US Department of Commerce.
China’s jet-set take on average three international trips a year, according to the Nielsen Mainland Chinese Luxury Shopper survey. Chinese consumers of luxury products also spend three times as much abroad as at home, a Bain & Company global report found.
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