Pitching L.A. to the Chinese

First in an occasional series looking at the increasingly close connections between China and California.

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-- Midway through the first half of the exhibition soccer match this week, the local all-stars were advancing against David Beckham and the Los Angeles Galaxy. The crowd at Shanghai Stadium stood up and roared. In a VIP suite, Jamie Lee hardly noticed the action on the field: She was too busy schmoozing with Chinese reporters.

“One of these days, you should come to L.A. and watch a Galaxy game,” Lee, chief rep of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau in China, told a journalist from the People’s Daily, angling for some publicity from the Communist Party’s mouthpiece. “You want to experience the real thing.”

Lee uses any chance she gets to sell Los Angeles to the Chinese. Next week she’ll be in Beijing for the Dodgers -- that’s the L.A. Dodgers, she says -- as the team plays the San Diego Padres in two exhibition games. In April, Lee hopes to capitalize on an Olivia Newton-John fundraiser for cancer research, called the Great Walk to Beijing.

What’s the Australian pop singer got to do with Los Angeles? She makes her home in the Southland, Lee says.

If that seems a bit of a stretch, Lee has good reason. In June, China and the U.S. are expected to implement new travel rules that will allow Chinese travel agencies to book tour groups to the U.S. for the first time. And American destinations and companies will be able to advertise directly to Chinese consumers.

That’s expected to bring a flood of Chinese tourists stateside -- and Los Angeles wants to grab a healthy share of them.

Some 320,000 Chinese visitors came to the U.S. in 2006 mainly on business and student visas -- and about 110,000 of those came to Los Angeles. Next year, L.A. city officials project that number to climb to at least 170,000, depending on how quickly the U.S. can handle visa applications.

Chinese tourists, with their increasing wealth, could give a boost to L.A.’s economy. But the city will be vying with San Francisco and New York, not to mention global hot spots such as Paris and Sydney, Australia, which have been marketing to Chinese tour groups for years.

That’s where the 42-year-old Lee comes in.

Since the bubbly UCLA graduate took on the job nearly two years ago, she’s called on many of China’s 640 tour operators approved to handle overseas travel, showing them what Los Angeles has to offer -- Hollywood, beaches, great weather year-round -- and how they might design future group packages.

Fluent in Mandarin, Taiwan-born Lee pays frequent visits to Chinese government offices as well, to stay on top of policy changes and to keep L.A. out front. One of her lobbying efforts is getting a Chinese airline to start a direct flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles.

Lee has had some success. She worked with China Travel Service to package a seven-day “incentive tour” for 500 top dealers of Hyundai Motors in China. The trip in January 2007 included overnight stays in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Two months later, Lee helped Los Angeles beat out Washington to host 600 Chinese government-sponsored street performers. The group celebrated the Lunar New Year with a parade in Hollywood.

“They must have spent a million dollars. They brought their own float,” she said.

Los Angeles is the only American city with a license from China’s National Tourism Administration, which allows someone like Lee to work in China and gives the city a stamp of approval on the agency’s website. That’s important in a country where government has a heavy hand in industry.

The popularity of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, widely known here for his movies, has boosted L.A.’s name and image in China, as have a growing number of Southland-based companies doing business in this nation.

“Asia and China are our highest priority now,” said Tim Leiweke, chief executive of AEG, the company that owns the Galaxy and is behind the L.A. Live development in downtown Los Angeles. At Wednesday’s game in Shanghai, Leiweke said his company was building half a dozen stadiums in China.

Also on hand for the Galaxy event: Hundreds of Chinese direct sellers for Herbalife Ltd., the Los Angeles-based marketer of nutritional supplements.

Some L.A. businesses are gearing up big time for Chinese tourists. Noel Irwin Hentschel, CEO of AmericanTours International, has hired a dozen Mandarin speakers in Los Angeles and opened an office at Beijing’s posh Oriental Plaza near Tiananmen Square, complete with a beautiful courtyard to entertain government and industry guests.

Lee’s work quarters aren’t so grand. They’re on the 12th floor of a nondescript tower in east Beijing, down the hall from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Lee has an administrative staff of two, plus a college intern. Pictures of downtown L.A.’s skyline, Hollywood and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa decorate an otherwise plain office.

Lee’s counterpart in Tokyo, Masahiro Andachi, was in Beijing last week, trading notes with her on trends in Asia-Pacific tourism and marketing Los Angeles. (Besides Japan and China, the private, nonprofit Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau has an office in London.)

Andachi, an industry veteran, was ruing the news that filled the airwaves in Japan in recent days: Kazuyoshi Miura, a Japanese tourist whose wife was shot in the head in downtown Los Angeles in 1981, was arrested in Saipan, part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Even though Miura was eventually convicted of committing the murder, the incident for years gave Los Angeles a bad name in Japan as a place rife with heinous street crime. With Miura back in the news, it was enough to give some Japanese consumers cold feet.

“I was not happy to see this news,” Andachi said, noting that Japanese tourism to Los Angeles had already been soft in recent months.

More than 516,000 Japanese visitors arrived in California in the first 11 months of 2007, the latest period for which statistics are available. That’s more than from any other country, but the number marked a 2% drop from the same period in 2006. By comparison, about 139,800 nonresident Chinese entered California from January to November last year -- up 13% from a year earlier.

Lee listened to the story about Miura with a blank stare. She was a student at Downey High School in 1981 and had never heard of the notorious murder. Worries about crime in Los Angeles might deter Japanese tourists, she said, but not the average Chinese -- at least not yet.

“The perception here of L.A. is it’s glitzy,” Lee said. “It’s Hollywood. . . . It’s the city of dreams.”

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don.lee@latimes.com