China Reports 33% Plunge in Tourism After Violence : Number of Foreign Visitors to Beijing Down 90% in July Following Army’s Crackdown on Protesters

China reported Tuesday a dramatic drop in the number of foreigners who visited the country in July following the previous month’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing.

The official China Daily newspaper quoted the State Tourism Administration as saying about 1.8 million foreigners, including tourists and business people, arrived in China in July, down 33% from July, 1988.

All but 80,000 of July’s 1.8 million visitors were ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and other countries, the report said.

The number of tourists visiting Beijing dropped by more than 90%. The capital has been under martial law since May.

Tourism plummeted in June after the army crushed student-led demonstrations in Tian An Men Square, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.

The dearth of visitors poses a serious problem because tourism is a major source of foreign exchange, which China desperately needs in order to import technology and high-quality raw materials vital to its industrial modernization.

Although China has taken pains to encourage Western investment and assure business people that they are welcome, the government is taking an increasingly hard line against private enterprise, which could weaken commercial links between China and the industrialized world.

Liberal Aspirations

The government has railed against soaring salaries in the small private sector and said Monday that it would close down many privately owned companies.

Although the government insists that it can contain the liberal aspirations expressed by the pro-democracy movement and still modernize the economy, many political analysts doubt that is the case. They predict relations between Western and Chinese enterprises may be chilled for some time.

China earned $2.2 billion from tourism in 1988, but diplomats have recently predicted that revenue this year could fall $700 million short of that figure.

Many hotels built in recent years to accommodate a burgeoning number of foreign tourists stand almost empty now. Some hotel staff have been ordered to take monthlong holidays and cuts of two-thirds in their wages.

Martial law troops toting machine guns still patrol street corners in the capital, and taxi drivers complain that there are too few foreigners for them to achieve their monthly earnings quotas.