By Ralph Jennings, Mandy Zuo
Published Mar 19, 2025
When Orrawan Khansamree and her husband decided to visit Shanghai this month, the couple wanted to see one place above all - and it was not any of the city’s historic landmarks.
“We’re visiting Disneyland,” said Khansamree, who is originally from Thailand. “It’s the biggest of its kind in the world.”
For the couple, Shanghai offers an enticing combination of huge entertainment complexes and affordable hotels and restaurants. That made the city a more attractive option than other popular destinations in the region, such as Tokyo.
“I will come again if more world-class parks are built,” she said.
Travellers like Khansamree are exactly the kind of visitor Shanghai is targeting with a new three-year plan to boost inbound tourism, which departs from previous strategies that focused on landmarks such as the Bund and the skyscrapers of Lujiazui.
The plan, which the municipal government released last month, aims to position the city of 25 million as China’s “premier inbound tourism gateway” and take full advantage of the country’s looser visa policies.
China offered 10-day visa-free entry to citizens of 54 countries last year to boost foreign tourism, and the policy made an immediate impact. Shanghai received 4.56 million foreign visitors in 2024, double the previous year’s total, according to the local government.
Shanghai aims to build on this success by leveraging a wide range of local attractions that currently mostly cater to domestic tourists - from megaprojects like the Shanghai Disney Resort to relics of the city’s communist heritage.
Local officials hope combining these venues with the city’s more traditional cultural and historic sites will create a more compelling offer for overseas visitors.
In the past, inbound travellers have normally visited landmarks such as Yuyuan Garden, the Bund riverside historic district, and the former French Concession.
“Shanghai is rich in cultural and tourism resources, characterised by its unique Shanghainese culture,” said Zhang Chen, vice-president of Chinese travel platform Fliggy. “This cultural blend integrates classical and modern, Eastern and Western aesthetic elements.”
In recent months, a huge influx of Korean visitors has descended on Shanghai to pose for selfies on the picturesque tree-lined streets of the former French Concession, after the area went viral on social media.
Meanwhile, a steady stream of foreign tourists could be seen entering Jingan Temple, a centuries-old Buddhist landmark in central Shanghai, on a rainy Wednesday in March.
“If I come to China, I want to see Chinese things, not things that we have in Paris,” said one French tourist at the temple, rejecting the appeal of Disneyland.
However, the city aims to widen its appeal by building a giant “matrix” of theme parks in the area surrounding the 9-year-old Shanghai Disney Resort, which stretches over 3.9 sq km in Shanghai’s eastern suburbs.
The huge new complex, Shanghai International Resort, will also encompass the Legoland Shanghai Resort which is due to open in mid-2025 and the world’s largest standalone Peppa Pig outdoor theme park, which will launch in 2027.
Though the venues are largely aimed at domestic tourists, they may also attract foreign visitors if they can combine visits to entertainment parks with sightseeing trips to older sites, travel specialists said.
“While historic landmarks will always remain core attractions, Shanghai is seeing a diversification in visitor profiles,” said Subramania Bhatt, CEO of the travel marketing and technology company China Trading Desk.
“With visa-free travel attracting more family-oriented tourists, demand for theme parks and immersive entertainment experiences will grow,” he said.
“However, instead of replacing historical sites, multi-attraction itineraries, for example, Bund plus Disneyland or French Concession plus Legoland, will likely become more common, blending traditional sightseeing with modern experiences.”
The plan appears to nod to this with a pledge to develop more “tourism routes combining air, rail and cruise travel options”.
It also calls for measures to develop major cultural events that can bring in foreign visitors, such as sporting events, music festivals and stage performances.
Meanwhile, the city will promote sites showcasing the history of China’s ruling Communist Party, as well as old buildings and neighbourhoods, the plan stated.
A French Concession building where the Communist Party held its first national congress in 1921 ranks among Shanghai’s major political landmarks.
The city will make efforts to ease “group visa arrangements for international visitors”, with an emphasis on “global tourism cooperation” with countries involved in China’s Belt and Road Initiative - a trade and infrastructure-building push that involves scores of nations.
The plan also pledges to roll out more multilingual signage across Shanghai to help visitors who cannot read Chinese - a bugbear of many tourists in the city.
“Focusing on art, history and food and beverage experiences is a smart move, but they need to make sure the foreign guests are well serviced, to make the experience a pleasant one that can be recommended,” said Max Modesti, an Italian citizen who co-owns a restaurant on the Bund.
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