China Slows Tourists, Students to US

Visits to the United States by Chinese business executives, tourists and college students are cooling down even as the trade war between the two nations heats up, The Washington Post is reporting.

Already, 102,000 fewer people from China have received business, leisure and education visas from May through September compared to the same time period last year. The newspaper attributed the information to the State Department, saying the drop-off represents a 13 percent decline.

And Chinese airline reservations to the U.S. plunged 42 percent for the first week in October.

Although it is not a result of any official action by the Chinese government, it all represents a potential weapon in that nation’s ability to fight back in the trade war, the Post said.

China has the potential to cut $60 billion Chinese consumers spend on American tourism-related services each year, the newspaper noted.

“We have expected that they will try a whole range of things to encourage us to back down,” said a senior administration official.

And Joy Dantong Ma, a research associate at the Paulson Institute in Chicago, added: “If it’s going to escalate, you’d expect it to move to other channels like tourism.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reported the administration will place tariffs on the rest of the country’s imports from China if Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping don’t make progress in talks to ease the trade dispute in November.

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