[Current Trends] Yes, There ARE More Tourists in China

The city has changed, and some of us didn't notice. And its offerings for tourism have exploded over the last several years.

Today, there is a specific kind of afternoon on the Bund now. It is dense with people who do not know where the good vantage point is yet, wandering with their phones up, asking each other in Russian or Spanish or English "can you take a photo of us." It is the same, incidentally, at Yuyuan Garden, and on the boardwalk in Lujiazui, and across the myriad of renovated spaces across Shanghai like Gate M or the Expo Park.

Credit: Jacob Aldaco

Caption: The glass enclosures at the botanical gardens inside the Expo park are stunning.

Even Zhujiajiao has it now. The water town, an hour outside the city that used to be a place you took visiting friends and relatives when you had run out of better ideas, pulled in 1.85 million visits in the first half of 2026 alone, leading the city's five ancient towns and helping push their combined total to 6.73 million.

Credit: Jacob Aldaco

Caption: Zhujiajiao

Of Shanghai's famous water towns, two are connected by Metro, Zhujiajiao out in Qingpu District, and Qibao in Minhang. If you're new to Shanghai and haven't visited one of its water towns yet, here are some quick primers on the city's top five by tourist numbers:

Zhujiajiao (Qingpu District): Zhujiajiao is the one everyone's already seen a photo of: 1,700 years old, 36 stone bridges, canal boats gliding under the wooden Fangsheng Bridge like it's auditioning for a shampoo commercial. Yes, it's crowded (basically Qingpu's answer to Disneyland, minus the mouse), go anyway, just go on a weekday morning before the tour buses figure out where they parked.

Fengjing (Jinshan District): Fengjing is what you get when you want the Zhujiajiao fantasy minus the 4,000 other people who also want it: same Ming and Qing bones, way fewer elbows, plus an honest to god artist colony tucked into the lanes. This is the one I actually send people to.

Qibao (Minhang District): Qibao's whole personality is convenience: one metro ride from downtown, a snack street that will not let you leave hungry, a shadow puppet theater and a cricket museum you didn't know you needed. It's small, it gets packed on weekends, and I still go, mostly for the food.

Xinchang (Pudong): Xinchang doesn't try very hard to be Instagram famous, which is exactly its appeal: a flagstone street, a stone archway with actual mileage on it, a drum museum nobody's rushing you through. Out in Pudong, quiet in a way the other four have mostly forgotten how to be. The Jiangnan First Teahouse is worth a visit.

Liantang (Qingpu again!): The most remote and least visited of the five, offering a genuinely peaceful walk through arcades, quays, and traditional residences along with more than ten stone bridges, best explored partly by boat.

Credit: Oleg Danisin

The city's own numbers back up what your eyes are telling you. Shanghai received 313 million visits in the first half of 2026 alone, up 17.6 percent on the same period last year, and the growth is not evenly spread. Inbound visitors were up nearly 28 percent to 5.31 million, with overnight arrivals climbing even faster. South Korea, Russia, the US, Thailand and Malaysia sent the most people. Russia sent the most new people, up 132 percent, which if you have been to a certain wine bar on Julu Road recently will not surprise you at all. The Bund, Lujiazui and Yuyuan Garden alone absorbed 47.78 million visits in six months. Foreigners riding the city's buses and subway on a passport rather than a transit card, which Shanghai tracks separately, were up almost 32 percent.

The Top 5 Countries Sending Shanghai Tourists

Credit: Jacob Aldaco

Americans Make Up the Top 5?

Here is a stat that should stop you mid scroll. Americans are one of Shanghai's top five inbound nationalities this year, right alongside South Korea, Russia, Thailand and Malaysia, and Americans are the only ones on that list who do not get an actual visa waiver. China currently runs its unilateral, thirty day, walk right through immigration exemption for roughly fifty countries, and the US is not one of them. What Americans get instead is the 240 hour transit exemption, ten days, open to some 55 nationalities including the US, at any of 65 ports now, and only if you are headed somewhere else afterward. You cannot fly from New York, spend ten days in Shanghai, and fly home. The rule requires an onward international destination, so technically you are transiting through China on your way to, say, Bangkok, for an extremely long layover. It is a workaround dressed up as a rule, and Americans are using it in numbers large enough to land the country in Shanghai's own top five anyway, without the government cutting them so much as an inch of the easy version everyone else on that list gets.

Credit: Ti Gong

Some of that gap is simple bilateral friction. In January last year, the looming ban on TikTok sent a large chunk of young America across the street to Xiaohongshu, the app everyone now calls RedNote, less as a considered decision than as a middle finger aimed at Washington. Whatever the motive, RedNote's daily American user count reportedly jumped from under 700,000 to something like 3.4 million in the space of a single day, and what those new arrivals found on the other side was not the country they had been told to expect. Xiaohongshu gave direct interaction to local Chinese, where Americans discovered that Chinese are lovely people, their cities are clean and modern, and they don't have to spend thousands of dollars just to ride an ambulance. Then came IShowSpeed, the 20-year-old livestreamer with tens of millions of subscribers, who spent two weeks last spring tearing through Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and half a dozen other cities with a camera crew and a bottomless well of energy, at one point pulling 5.6 million live viewers out of a single six hour stream from the Bund. Between the two of them, RedNote and Speed did something no ministry has ever quite managed. They made China look like somewhere you would actually want to go, to millions of Americans who had never once considered it.

Tourism Has Been Steadily Recovering And Has Surpassed Pre-2020 Numbers

It is worth zooming out for a second, because the six month snapshot only tells you the city is hot right now, not how it got here. Go back to the last real baseline year, 2019, and Shanghai counted 8.97 million inbound visitors for the whole year. Then came the years nobody needs reminding of, and by 2023 that annual number had collapsed to 3.64 million, a fraction of where it had been. It took until 2025 for Shanghai to finally climb back past the 2019 line, landing at 9.36 million inbound visitors for the year, and the growth in between was not gentle. It nearly doubled one year and grew by another 40 percent the next. Recoveries like that do not happen because a country got easier to enter alone.

It's Not Just Visa-Free... Here's a Big Fat List of Things Shanghai Has Done To Attract Tourists
I want to resist the easy, lazy read here, which is that China flipped a switch called "visa free" and tourists fell out of the sky. The visa waivers mattered, obviously, they got people to the airport, and the policy itself keeps getting extended, most recently through the end of this year. But a waiver gets you through immigration. It does not get you a taxi, a hotel room, a phone plan, or lunch, and it doesn't guarantee you'll tell your friends back home "you must go visit China." What actually happened in Shanghai over the last three years is that a brain trust of earnest officials from the culture & tourism administration, the foreign affairs office, the information office, the municipal transportation commission, and the commerce commission all played roles, working through the entire chain of small, annoying frictions that make a foreign visitor's first 48 hours challenging, and fixed them one at a time.

You're clued in to this sort of work that the city does, if you're constantly writing and editing pieces on these initiatives:

Payments

Overseas bank cards now able to be added to WeChat Pay
How to use foreign bank cards for digital payment in China
WeChat Pay unveils more incentives for overseas card payments – fee waivers, plus the airport "Seamless Transfers" initiative
[Big News] PAYPAL Can Now Be Used in China

Any surviving skepticism that "Shanghai doesn't want foreigners" needs to be dumped in the trash pronto. Start with money, because money is where every tourist's day quietly falls apart. As recently as 2023, a foreign card in Shanghai got you a hotel front desk and maybe a fancy restaurant, and that was it. Everything else ran on Alipay or WeChat Pay, and neither would talk to a Visa or a Mastercard. WeChat Pay opened direct binding for overseas cards from the major networks in mid 2023, Alipay followed the same year and added its own short stay TourCard option for anyone who did not want to link a card at all, and by last May, Tencent was still sweetening the deal for foreign cardholders, waiving the fee entirely under 200 yuan. By this spring, even PayPal could scan a WeChat QR code, which is the kind of detail that sounds boring until you remember that a coffee, a subway fare and a hotpot dinner all used to require three separate arguments with a cashier.

Credit: Oleg Danisin

On the ground, the shift is physical. Shanghai counted roughly 36,000 point of sale terminals set up to take foreign cards in its main commercial districts back in late 2023, a number that has only grown since, and the metro system rolled out dedicated machines so tourists can buy a subway ticket with a foreign card rather than being handed off to a station attendant who feels as awkward about it as you do.

Transit/Transport

The airports and the port got the same treatment. Shanghai's two airports launched a joint effort called "Shanghai to the World, Seamless Transfers" aimed at exactly the kind of connecting passenger who used to skip the city entirely on a layover. Meanwhile the cruise business, which nobody outside the industry pays attention to, quietly became a real pipeline of new arrivals. Shanghai's port handled 126 cruise ship calls and 744,000 passengers in the first half of 2026 alone, close to three quarters of the entire country's cruise traffic, and foreign passengers arriving that way were up nearly 38 percent, more than four in five of them walking off the ship on a visa free basis.

Entry

English Digital City Infrastructure Platforms

Credit: Jacob Aldaco

Caption: The sunset between buildings facing west along the North Bund

Two English platforms also came out of this same push, and one of them is the site you are reading right now, so take the endorsement for what it is worth. International Services Shanghai launched at the start of last year, run by the city government, as a portal for anyone trying to work, study or just exist here as a foreigner, plugged straight into the city's official service system. City News Service came earlier, in 2022, built to translate the gap between what is actually happening in Shanghai and what foreigners could previously only get secondhand through a WeChat translation from a friend of a friend.

CNS has since outgrown the original brief and we're being busy bees turning the platform into something closer to a full-service app, with a physical community hub now open in Qingpu. Whether either platform counts as infrastructure in the way a subway line does is a fair question. I would argue that a platform that shows you how to live in Shanghai, what to do in Shanghai, and informs on what is happening here, is just as helpful to a normal week as a functioning, on-time metro.

Healthcare

Telecom:

Shopping

Urban Renewal

Then there is the city itself, which has been quietly getting a facelift the entire time everyone was complaining about it. Old lane housing across town has been going through structural renovation on a rolling basis, Shanghai finished one full year's renovation quota ahead of schedule with shikumen neighborhoods preserved rather than bulldozed, and a separate round of urban renewal projects has gone block by block, reproducing glazed roof tile that is a hundred years old by hand on Nanchang Road and redoing stone finishes on Wuyi Road with techniques most contractors alive today were never taught. That is what the drilling was. That is what all of it was.

Caption:

For video credits see this article: https://www.citynewsservice.cn/articles/shanghaidaily/in-focus/shanghai-grand-opera-house-the-citys-newest-cultural-marvel-zmz8rdwm

Art and Theater Are Also A Draw
None of this would matter if there were nothing to see once you got here, and this is the part of the story locals tend to undersell because we have simply stopped registering it. The exhibition circuit alone logged nearly a thousand shows on 19.34 million square meters of floor space last year, and most of that space, well over four fifths of it, went to shows with an international angle rather than a purely domestic one. The China Art Museum is currently hosting 472 artifacts from the Mawangdui Han tombs, the largest such show outside Hunan province, timed to overlap with a summer packed with 26 concerts and the return of Music in the Summer Air, which this year brought in Joe Hisaishi. The Shanghai Grand Opera House opens in October after six years of construction, with what is reportedly the best stage machinery in Asia. City revenue tied to culture cracked 1.4 trillion yuan last year for the first time, enough to hold onto Shanghai's title as the country's leading gateway city for inbound tourism.

Shanghai's Theme Parks Are A HUGE Draw

Credit: Jacob Aldaco

Caption: Shanghai Disney's most endorphin inducing ride, Tron.

And then there is Disneyland, which I will admit I did not expect to be writing about in the same piece as museum funding, but here we are. The resort just passed 100 million visitors and is in the middle of the largest construction wave since it opened, with a ninth themed land based on Spider Man already under construction, a third hotel topped out, and a fourth on the way. Down the road, Legoland opened its biggest park anywhere on a 318,000 square meter site in Jinshan last July (we still need to visit), the brand's eleventh park globally and its largest by size, which tells you this is not just a Disney story, it is a citywide bet on theme parks as tourism infrastructure in their own right.

The Disney expansion is confirmed. What is not confirmed, and what every theme park blog on the internet has been chewing on since February, is whether Shanghai gets a second gate entirely. The land next to the existing park was rezoned for commercial and transit use back in January 2025, which is the kind of paperwork that makes theme park reporters lose their minds, and by June, Forbes was reporting an announcement could land any day, timed to the resort's tenth birthday. It did not happen. The tenth anniversary passed without a reveal, and Disney's official position remains that it is focused on current expansions. Make of that what you will. I make of it that the company that turned a swamp in Florida into four gates is looking at Shanghai's numbers and doing the same math everyone else in this story has already done.

Alright Alright
There is a ton more that could be said. But at the end of the day, there are three questions answered:

1) Is Shanghai's tourism industry improving?
--> Yes, growth is happening every year.

2) How are tourism #'s today, compared to 2019?

--> Shanghai has surpassed 2019 numbers across nearly all metrics.

3) Is it just because of the visa-free policies?

---> No, the US is among the top 5 source countries for inbound tourists, and the city has done a TON to elevate Shanghai's status to "dang, this is great" level.

All I can say, is if you are in the tourism and hospitality industry, you better start ramping up your marketing budgets. There is a lot of commercial potential flooding into Shanghai.