It’s now much easier to visit – MASHAHER

Instead, you can now more-or-less book a flight, pack your passport and go, providing you stay fewer than 15 days and travel for tourism, businesses or family reunion purposes. This visa-free scheme, which runs until December 31, 2025, was announced during Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Australia earlier this year – part of the same soft diplomacy, “back in the good books” package that secured Adelaide Zoo two new pandas.

So, has there been an explosion of Australian tourism in China?

It’s difficult to say, but there are several indications to suggest China is a long way off becoming the jewel of Asia for Australians. And you’ll have to pry many a Bintang from cold dead hands to knock Bali off the top of the travel list.

This year’s annual Lowy Institute survey, which measures Australians’ attitudes towards the world, revealed people continue to harbour low levels (17 per cent) of trust towards China, while 71 per cent think China will become a military threat to Australia in the next 20 years.

This overall negative sentiment was also reflected in polling published by American think-tank Pew Research Center in July. It found 85 per cent of Australians had an “unfavourable” view of China, with just 14 per cent holding a positive view.

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Almost two months into the visa-free scheme, there is little hard data available to gauge interest levels. The most recent immigration figures published by the Department of Home Affairs are from the end of May, when just over 12,000 Australians had returned home from a holiday in China. But the department cautions this data may be incomplete, and relies on self-reporting.

Nonetheless, it’s an extremely low starting base – in the same month more than 66,000 Australians holidayed in Japan.

At the Chinese end, the government publishes immigration statistics, which state that 17.2 million foreigners visited the country in the first six months of this year, but doesn’t break it down by country. My queries to the Chinese embassy on the uptake of the visa-free travel went unanswered.

More anecdotally, tour company Intrepid Travel says it has seen a boom in demand for their China tours.

“It was an immediate uptick. Our sales [of China tours] went up 133 per cent just in that week alone,” says Yvette Thompson, Intrepid’s general manager of sales and marketing for Australia and New Zealand.

“China had been off the travel radar for some time. We go to over 100 countries, but now it’s ranking at number 13, and that’s the highest we’ve ever seen it.”

But it is a pretty safe conclusion that the volatile Australia-China relationship, and extensive media coverage of the ever-tightening authoritarian grip of the Chinese state over its citizens under President Xi Jinping has dampened a few appetites. Not to mention the suspended death sentence that hangs over Chinese-Australian democracy writer Yang Hengjun who is languishing in a Beijing jail. Or the hefty sentence likely awaiting Australian citizen Gordon Ng who is jailed in Hong Kong for his role in a democracy protest that was snuffed out by Beijing’s national security laws.

The visa-free travel announcement has given Chinese state media renewed opportunity to paint the Western reporting of China as one-eyed.

“The sense of contrast is the most intuitive feeling of many foreign tourists after enjoying China’s great rivers and mountains and breathing the air of Chinese culture. Some foreign travel bloggers even said that they have been ‘cheated by Western media’,” the state-run Xinhua news agency said in a recent report.

Far from being part of a conspiracy, Australian journalists remain largely confined to reporting the China story through the lens of geopolitics, due to the Chinese government’s decision to deny them entry – bar a few tightly controlled occasions – to report from within the country. The story of China’s rise, its competition with the United States, and its territorial ambitions, is reshaping global politics. It may well be the biggest story of the 21st century, but it’s not the only one.

China is a country of a more than a billion people, its vastness and depth of history and culture are difficult to comprehend from afar. I’d be on a plane tomorrow if I could.

In the meantime, please enjoy this magnificent photo taken by colleague Sanghee Liu in early August of the Perseid meteor shower lighting up the night sky over the Amne Machin mountain range, a sacred Tibetan Buddhist site, in north-west China’s Qinghai Province.