Is China the New Japan? Here Are the Top 5 Places to Visit
China is the trip everyone's about to take
Japan had a good run as Asia's obsession. For about a decade, it was the answer to every "where should I travel next" conversation at every dinner table in every city. The cherry blossoms, the ryokans, the 7-Eleven onigiri at 2am, the bullet trains that were always on time. Japan was aspirational. Japan was cinematic. Japan was, frankly, exhausting to get a table at.
It's also now wall-to-wall tourists, a Kyoto that's actively trying to keep you out, and no longer the bargain it once was now that the yen's found its feet again.
So now, finally, our attentions have shifted a little more to the East.
If you've been paying attention to your feed over the last year or so, you'll have noticed a certain kind of video: tourists walking through Chinese cities, bewildered that something like this can exist. We’re seeing crowds at Zhangjiajie elevators. Everyone is coveting the viral Adidas jacket. We all want hotpot now and we all are suddenly dying to see the pandas.
Well, this is the time for China. Foreign arrivals to China jumped 83 percent in 2024. Over 64 million cross-border entries. The policy shift matters here. China has spent the last two years making itself dramatically easier to enter. Over 50 countries — most of Europe, the UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea — now get 30 days visa-free. The transit visa window was extended to 240 hours, which means a connecting flight through Beijing or Shanghai can legally become a six-day trip. Alipay and WeChat Pay, the apps that made cash-less China feel impenetrable to outsiders, now accept foreign credit cards. The friction has been deliberately engineered out.
China has figured out that ease of access is a product. They are selling it aggressively. And it's working!
The food is extraordinary and costs nothing. The high-speed rail network is the best in the world. The cities will recalibrate your sense of what a city can be. And outside of Beijing and Shanghai, the crowds are still manageable.
Where to Go
Forget Beijing-Shanghai-Great Wall. That circuit still has its merits but it's the Tokyo-Kyoto-Osaka of China: overrun, overpriced relative to what else is available. Here's where to actually go.
Chengdu
Everyone comes to Chengdu because of the pandas, which is reasonable. The Giant Panda Breeding Research Base is legitimately unmissable — yes, it's touristy, yes you'll be elbowing for a photo, but you still won’t regret it.
But the panda thing is almost a distraction from the fact that Chengdu is one of the more culturally interesting cities in Asia right now. It's a major tech hub — Intel, Foxconn, a genuinely thriving startup scene. Then there's the food, which deserves its own standing ovation: Sichuan mala hotpot will numb your lips, confuse your senses, and make every hotpot you've ever eaten before feel like a scam.
Chongqing
If Blade Runner had a Chinese cousin, it lives in Chongqing. There is no good way to prepare someone for Chongqing. It is built across steep hills at the meeting point of two rivers, which sounds manageable until you're inside it and realising that the metro passes through the middle of a residential tower block on its way to the next station. Highways stack on top of each other in four or five layers. Skyscrapers emerge directly from cliff faces. At night, the whole thing lights up and fogs over and you genuinely cannot tell where the city ends and the sky begins.
This is China's largest municipality — more people than most countries — and it is almost entirely absent from the itinerary of the average Western traveller.
Xi'an
The Terracotta Army is one of those rare attractions that actually exceeds its reputation — Pit 1 alone is the size of an aircraft hangar, filled with 8,000 individually sculpted soldiers who have been standing in formation since 210 BC.
But Xi'an's sell is its identity as the ancient eastern terminus of the Silk Road, a city where Central Asian and Chinese cultures blurred together and the evidence is still visible in the food. The Muslim Quarter — a dense grid of lanes in the old city — is one of the great street food experiences in Asia: lamb skewers over charcoal, rou jia mo (a cumin-spiced braised-meat sandwich that predates the hamburger by roughly two millennia), cold liangpi noodles.
The ancient city wall is intact and walkable — you can rent a bike and ride the full 14-kilometer circuit around the old city, which is something you simply cannot do anywhere else.
Zhangjiajie
James Cameron didn't actually film here. He just saw photographs and turned them into Pandora. The floating Hallelujah Mountains in Avatar are, essentially, Zhangjiajie — vertical columns of quartzite sandstone, hundreds of metres tall, draped in cloud and subtropical forest.
The Bailong Elevator is a 326-metre outdoor lift attached to the side of a cliff. It carries you from the valley floor to the ridge in under two minutes. (Whether those are the best or worst two minutes of your life will depend entirely on your relationship with vertiginous glass structures bolted to ancient rock.)
Foreign arrivals jumped 166 percent in 2024. This is still, just barely, a place you can visit without fighting crowds. And it’s truly worth the trip.
Shanghai
Shanghai is the obvious answer, which doesn't make it the wrong one? The Bund-to-Pudong skyline view across the Huangpu is one of those genuinely earned spectacles, and it doesn’t matter how many Instagram photos you’ve seen this place in. The French Concession still remains genuinely good. And the food — xiaolongbao, red-braised pork, scallion oil noodles, drunken chicken — is its own cuisine entirely.