Premier schmoozes in Shanghai as Victoria launches drive to double Chinese visitors

2 hours ago 1

Shanghai: With China’s burgeoning middle class rediscovering their appetite for international travel for the first time since the pandemic, Victoria has launched a $43 million advertising campaign aimed at doubling its number of Chinese visitors over the next four years.

At a swanky event at Shanghai’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on Wednesday night, Premier Jacinta Allan revealed details of the Visit Victoria campaign already on display on a prominent billboard in the city.

A Victorian tourism billboard in Shanghai.

The Every Bit Different campaign, which will also be rolled out to other global travel markets, is focused on reconnecting Chinese tourists to Melbourne and Victoria’s regions and rebooting the state’s second-largest service export after education.

The brand ambassador for the campaign is Wu Chun, a former Mandopop boy band member and TV actor who studied at RMIT.

While 411,000 Chinese visited Victoria last year – a figure 23 per cent up on the previous year – and tipped $2.9 billion into the local economy, these numbers remain below pre-pandemic levels.

Victoria’s China Strategy announced by Allan in Beijing this week forecasts that by 2029 nearly 800,000 Chinese tourists will spend a night in the state.

Jacinta Allan visited the warehouse of Dingdong Fresh in Shanghai.

The new campaign is timed to catch a wave of tourism that began at the start of China’s summer. The World Travel and Tourism Council reported in April that the number of Chinese taking international holidays this season was expected to finally surpass its pre-COVID mark.

Australia shut its doors to all tourists for two years during the pandemic, closing international airports to non-citizens between March 2020 and February 2022. Despite Australia being open for the past three years, the Chinese have been tentative about booking travel anywhere outside their own borders.

The travel bug now appears to be replacing any residual fear of the virus. Last month, the China-based Global Times reported that travel agents had doubled their bookings for this summer’s travel season compared with last year.

According to Victorian government figures, tourism contributed $21.7 billion to the state’s economy and supported more than 200,000 jobs in 2023-24. Visit Victoria chief executive Brendan McClements, who has been tracking the recovery of Chinese international travel, said the government-funded advertising campaign would have a profound effect on the state’s visitor economy.

The new tourism campaign is timed ahead of Shenzhen Airlines and Hong Kong Airlines scheduling more direct flights to Melbourne.

Allan attended the Visit Victoria campaign launch at the end of a hectic day’s schedule in Shanghai, where she visited the warehouse of Dingdong Fresh, a Chinese business that emerged during the pandemic as a digital distributor of groceries to people’s homes, and witnessed the signing of an agreement with Chinese manufacturer KN to provide more components for Melbourne trams.

Dingdong Fresh, a politically savvy food distribution start-up, supported by Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell, will promote Victorian produce on its home page as part of a “Direct from Victoria” pitch.

The premier was unable to say how much the campaign would be worth to Australian food companies, but the Dingdong Fresh app is seen daily by about 2 million Chinese.

The agreement with KN, signed with Victorian-based assembler of trams, trains and heavy vehicles Assemco, was also witnessed by a delegation of Victorian manufacturers.

From there, Allan reopened Vic House, a government-funded showroom in downtown Shanghai used for hosting business networking events.

Allan’s China roadshow, her first as Victorian premier, has been criticised by former premier Jeff Kennett for its inclusion of four backbench MPs whose electorates have large contingents of Chinese voters, and for her promise to bring more Chinese students to the state at a time when major universities are operating under enrolment caps set by Canberra.

Allan dismissed the criticisms, made on X, as “some random social media posts from a former premier”, and defended the make-up of her travelling party, which also includes parliamentary secretary for trade Paul Hamer, whose electorate of Box Hill contained nearly 21,000 people of Chinese ancestry at the time of the last census.

Hamer said that for him, the trip was about community connection. “Many of them have come from places like Beijing and Nanjing and Shanghai, and just seeing that their representative is in their city of birth and a city they know well and have done business with over many years, I think that just goes to build a stronger connection,” he said.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.