Posted on: Sunday, September 9, 2001

Editorial
China opening can help Hawai'i tourism

It's reasonable to suggest that opening a Hawai'i tourism office in Beijing is getting a bit ahead of the curve. But in the visitor business, that's a good place to be.

Most Americans think of China as a still-backward country. But there are two Chinas today: one with vast numbers of people in extreme poverty, and the other newly wealthy and unabashedly materialistic. While most Chinese save for many months to buy a television, there's a jet-setting few who are buying Buicks, cellular phones, single-family homes — and international travel is very much on their agenda.

The Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau, which plans to open an office in Beijing this month and another later in Shanghai, says it projects Chinese visitors to increase from about 50,000 a year now to 300,000 — about equal to Canadian visitors — in the next five to 10 years.

Indeed, Hawai'i may already be playing host to more Chinese than we realize. For one thing, many of them are coming here via Tokyo or the U.S. Mainland, rather than direct from China.

Also probably disguising the strength of the numbers to some extent may be a tendency of some Chinese tourists to try to maintain a low profile while traveling. After all, it wasn't that long ago that wealthy Chinese were relentlessly persecuted by the Communists.

Travel, of course, will certainly have a salutory effect on Chinese society, as visitors — many of them influential at home — observe a free society in operation. It makes sense for the HVCB to get in on the ground floor of Chinese tourism.