As geopolitical tensions rise, fewer visitors are traveling to the world's No. 2 economy, widening the East-West divide. By Aug. 3, 2023 5:30 am ET, Shanghai airport was sparsely populated recently, with far fewer people arriving to China from overseas trips organized by travel agencies.

Half a year after China lifted Covid-19 restrictions and reopened its borders, few international travelers are coming — another sign of decoupling between China and the West that could have negative repercussions for a long time.

Foreign travelers' absence is particularly evident in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where the numbers of foreigners who visited in the first half of the year totaled less than a quarter of comparable figures in 2019, before the Covid pandemic.

Nationwide, just 52,000 people arrived to mainland China from overseas on trips organized by travel agencies during the first quarter, the latest period for which national data is available, compared with 3.7 million in the first quarter of 2019. As in past years, nearly half of the visitors came from the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than farther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.

"The number of visitors from Europe, America, Japan and Korea are all dropping, substantially," said Xiao Qianhui, a director with the semiofficial China Tourism Association in a speech in May.