Why Chinese tourists matter

India has the capacity to entertain many more tourists from across our northern borders

India’s large and growing trade deficit with China has agitated our policymakers over the past decade. All efforts to bridge the trade gap or even reduce it have so far come to naught. Our efforts to export more basmati and non-basmati rice, sugar, cotton, mangoes, grapes, pomegranate and sapota have not dented the ballooning deficit. Our attempts to sell software and pharmaceuticals to the Middle Kingdom have run into elaborate Chinese non-tariff barriers. Our deficit with China constitutes the bulk of our global trade deficit. 

India’s expanding trade deficit is dictated by the composition of our trade with China. When we import every kind of finished, value-added product — including iron and steel, electronics, electricals, power equipment and mobile handsets — no amount of pro-active effort by our exporting community to boost the sales of primary produce to China will narrow the deficit. This is dictated by the nature of our imports and exports. 

The key to balancing our deficit with China is not to look at the balance of trade, but instead to focus on the Invisibles part of our bilateral balance of payments. India needs to boost the number of in-bound Chinese tourists to our country. We need to do this quickly. We need to do this on a large scale. We need to do this with a game plan in mind.

In 2018, Chinese tourists made 150 million trips abroad. In that same year, India received just 250,000 tourists from China. India needs to work on attracting a sizeable chunk of the large numbers of Chinese nationals who travel outside their country. Even one per cent of this number works out to a whopping 1.5 million Chinese visitors to India. This enhanced tourist inflow would help balance our payments with China on the current account. This is where India needs to focus its efforts.

We must make a herculean effort in the coming two years on this score. It needs to be a public-private effort, where the central government, the state governments and our privately-owned-and-run tourism industry pool all their resources and work in tandem. 

An excellent start in this direction was made in August 2018, when Tourism Minister KJ Alphonse conducted a series of tourism road shows in four major Chinese cities. Our efforts cannot end there. India must expand the size of the India Tourist Office in Beijing and put more resources at its disposal. We need to appoint a top-of-the line strategic consultant in China to aid us in drawing up a comprehensive tourism development plan. This should be backed up by hiring an excellent PR firm to help us get our message of “Incredible India” out to the Chinese audience.

This message needs to be taken down from the metropolitan cities of China to the tier-2 and tier-3 cities too, since many of the potential tourists live there. Advertising campaigns, bus-wrap projects as well as on-line blitzes will be necessary.

While we already have tourism material in the Chinese language and India Tourism also boasts a Chinese language website, surely we can make some incredible advertising with a well-known Chinese film or sports star as the face of our campaign in China. Perhaps, Aamir Khan (whose films are loved by Chinese audiences) and Jackie Chan could be made brand ambassadors for India.

 

It is critical for our promotion efforts to be intense, ongoing and continuous, focused on our end goal and credible. If we are able to bring such single-mindedness to bear, we can achieve the objective of attracting significant Chinese tourism to India. 

Many Chinese tourists, but not all, prefer to travel in groups, and special catering may be necessary in terms of accommodation, food and local transportation. India’s Buddhist trail is sure to be especially attractive, but so will our beaches, our mountains, our forests, and our historical sites. We have the capacity to entertain many more tourists from across our northern borders. What is required is a concerted push and a special effort to get our message across to them. Such an effort could see up to 1.5 million Chinese tourists visiting India by 2020.

Not merely will this help us achieve all our targets for the tourism sector, but it will also provide gainful employment to many of our countrymen and women, while at the same time balancing out our trade deficit with China. 

The writer is a former Indian Ambassador to China. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Symbiosis International (Deemed University). 

The views are personal