[Current Trends] Tourists Pay Top Dollar for a Front-Row Look at China's Tech Boom

Chetan Shah has done the China tech circuit more than once, and he doesn't pretend it's cheap.

"They are a little bit expensive, to be honest, but there's access to things I can't buy," the Mumbai-based investor told US tech outlet Rest of World.

Some of these tours run as high as US$9,000, not including flights. What that buys is a few days inside places most visitors never get near – electric-vehicle plants, robotics startups, and AI labs – plus private Q&A sessions with company executives.

Some of the companies drawing the most interest include BYD, Unitree Robotics and DeepSeek. BYD has overtaken Tesla in global EV sales. Unitree's humanoid robots have gone viral online. DeepSeek is the AI startup often compared to ChatGPT.

Packages carry names like "Shanghai AI and Robotics Innovation Tour" or "EV and Battery Deep Dive" and typically run three to five days.

China logged 22.914 million foreign arrivals in the first half of this year, up 20.4 percent from a year earlier, the National Immigration Administration said in July.

Fewer of those visitors are coming just to see what China was. More visitors are coming to see what China is currently building.

Yuan Shaoyu, an adjunct professor of international relations at New York University who studies China's soft power, describes the appeal in terms of professional FOMO – fear of missing out.

"The sense that China's tech ecosystem has reached a level of sophistication where not seeing it firsthand puts you at an informational disadvantage relative to competitors who have," Yuan told Rest of World.

Chasing the future, not the past

German content creator Thomas Derksen, known across China by his nickname "Afu," has spent recent years touring factories, livestreaming hubs and tech exhibitions around the country. For him, the appeal is ultimately singular.

"A technology may still be at the research-paper stage elsewhere, but in China it can be running on a production line six months later," Derksen told the Global Times. "There is no better place to observe where the future of manufacturing is heading."

What stands out in visitor accounts is not one specific flashy product; rather, it is the intricate supply chain that supports it.

British content creator Simon Phillips, who first arrived in China in 1998 and has split his time between China and the UK ever since, built his own "Future Technology Tour" for visitors, usually starting in Shenzhen.

"If Silicon Valley became famous for software innovation, Shenzhen demonstrates what happens when innovation, engineering and manufacturing come together within one extraordinary ecosystem," Phillips told the Global Times.

Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, put it another way: elsewhere, technology tourism means walking through a park and taking photos.

In China, visitors watch robots and AI systems actually running – in hotels, malls, factories, transportation and homes – rather than seeing them staged behind glass.

A trend built into policy

The trend has moved well past word-of-mouth. Spring Tour, a Chinese travel agency, launched a drone-technology route in Shanghai this summer, letting visitors try flight simulators and watch drone shows.

Online platform Fliggy rolled out customized technology study tours for overseas visitors around the same time, with families and students constituting a large share of participants.

China's national tourism plan for 2026-2030 encourages industrial companies in sectors from aerospace to shipbuilding and auto manufacturing to open their doors to visitors and build dedicated tourism routes.

As Phillips put it in one of his posts, "Welcome to China. Welcome to the Future."