More and more, touristic flows from China to Russia are in the news. According to reports, more than 400,000 Chinese visited Russian in 2014 alone, and the most recent numbers show double this many tourists.
Russian tourism is thriving and the amount of Chinese tourists arriving to Russia is growing exponentially.
Chinese travelers listed Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ulyanovsk, and Kazan as their most desireable destinations in 2014. But other destinations like Sochi and even Crimea are showing up on the Chinese vacation radar these days. As for typical travel trends for China tour seekers, so called “Red tourism” has become all the rage, as Chinese tourists are drawn to visiting revolutionary attractions in countries like Russia. Here in Germany, the childhood home of Karl Marx in nearby Trier is inundated daily with visitors from Beijing and other China cities.
Red tourism is not a trend, the Chinese government has been promoting it since the early 2000s. The country has invested more than $1.3 billion to build the new tourism dynamic. RT reported recently that over one million tourists from China visited Russia in 2015, spending nearly $1 billion. And the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) has an agreement to develop so-called ‘red tourism’ with the Ulyanovsk Lenin Memorial Museum.
So, given the rise of resorts like those in Sochi, greater cooperation between the Russian and Chinese leadership, and the value of the relative currencies, Russia will continue to thrive as a touristic choice for Chinese travelers.
