What to Know About Traveling to China for Business

Amid growing tensions and an escalating trade war between the United States and China, international business travelers may be understandably wary about traveling to the Chinese mainland. The US Department of State currently has a Level 2 travel advisory for China, instructing visitors to “exercise increased caution” because of the “arbitrary enforcement of local laws.”

The reality on the ground is more complicated. While there have been instances of detention of US nationals, exit bans, and raids on foreign company offices in China, for the vast majority of travelers, a trip to the country is business as usual. Each week there are 50 round-trip flights directly from the US to China, and in some cases China has made it easier to obtain business visas.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t risks, and those risks should be weighed especially by those who might end up in the crosshairs of the Chinese government.

“It’s less of a welcoming environment to Americans than it was in the 2010s,” says Isaac Stone Fish, CEO and founder of Strategy Risks, a China-focused business intelligence firm.

When Stone Fish sees on-the-record comments from people working at global and US-based companies, he tends to see optimism about traveling to China and the environment there. “But when you have private conversations with them,” he says, “they’re a lot more pessimistic, and traveling to China on a business trip is more challenging than it used to be.”

It wasn’t long ago that China was welcoming swelling numbers of foreigners, and international businesses and business travelers, across its borders. On August 8, 2008, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics was a watershed moment in China’s relationship to the wider world. Hosted in the National Stadium, otherwise known as the Bird’s Nest, and directed by House of Flying Daggers filmmaker Zhang Yimou, the event had a reported budget of $300 million and featured 15,000 volunteer performers, including 2,008 choreographed drummers.

The packed stadium contained leaders from across the globe, including US president George W. Bush and Russia’s then-prime minister Vladimir Putin, and an estimated 2 billion people watched the event on television.

One of the Games’ themes was “Beijing Welcomes You.” China was ascendent. Despite the emerging global economic crisis, the country’s GDP in 2008 reached $4.42 trillion, or 9 percent year-on-year growth. Foreign companies were rushing to do business in China. Apple Stores opened in major cities across the country to sell computers that were made in Chinese factories. Hollywood movies shoehorned Chinese plotlines into megabudget movies aiming to get the movies screened in Chinese theaters. It was the dawn of a new era.

Or so the world thought. In 2012, Xi Jinping, a career Communist Party official and son of a party cadre, became the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and the next year he was named the country’s seventh president. Under Xi’s leadership, China turned inward. He launched vast anti-corruption campaigns to weed out enemies and saw the creation of a vast surveillance regime to monitor the population. Relations with Western nations suffered, and when Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016 they were weakened even further. Expatriate businesspeople left in droves, accelerated by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and China’s strict “Zero Covid” policy.

Today, with Trump in his second term, relations between China and the West are at their lowest point in decades. Foreign executives express growing concerns about doing business there, fearing potential exit bans, pervasive government surveillance, risks to sensitive data, even arbitrary detentions. Most business travelers to China will come and go without issue, but experts suggest anyone doing business in the country take precautions to protect themselves, and reconsider going if they are at heightened risk of detention.

This story is part of The New Era of Work Travel_, a collaboration between the editors of WIRED and Condé Nast Traveler to help you navigate the perks and pitfalls of the modern business trip._

There are several reasons for a cooler business environment today than in decades past, Stone Fish explains. First, there are much more sophisticated Chinese competitors in many sectors, which has translated to a less welcoming business environment for multinational companies, including difficulties obtaining licenses to operate in China or getting contract approval to work with Chinese firms.

The second factor is omnipresent government surveillance, including the proliferation of security cameras, listening devices, and phone bugs. China currently has an estimated 700 million security cameras in the country, many with face recognition technology, and a 2025 report by iVerify, a mobile security firm, found that China already has access to at least 60 mobile operators in 35 countries, including some US allies.

The third reason for the chill is the strong leftward turn of the Communist Party under Xi, and the increased tensions between the US and China that have resulted, according to Stone Fish.

A 2022 report by Chris Carr and Jack Wroldsen, called “Exit Bans When Doing Business in China” and published in the Thunderbird International Business Review, a business journal published by Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, found that exit bans had been used since the 1980s as a court-sanctioned tool to allow Chinese citizens and companies to settle business disputes with foreign companies and individuals. Between 1995 and 2019, they had identified 128 total cases, although they suspected the actual number to be higher.

In 2023, fears among foreign business travelers to China grew when several top executives of foreign firms were barred from leaving the country amid business disputes, including one Hong Kong–based senior executive of the US risk-advisory firm Kroll, and a senior investment banker at the Japanese firm Nomura, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal at the time. The State Department increased its warning to Level 3, the second highest level, advising Americans to reconsider travel to the country.

At the time, several Americans were held in Chinese detention, including Kai Li, who had been detained since 2016 on espionage charges; Jong Leung, who had received a life sentence in 2023 for espionage; and Mark Swidan, a Texas native who was detained in 2012 and sentenced to death with a two year reprieve in 2019 for drug-related crimes. David Lin, an American pastor, had also spent nearly two decades in prison on fraud charges.

In 2024, the Biden Administration secured the release of all four men, and the State Department reduced its travel advisory to Level 2.

Today, Chinese citizens who work for foreign companies, dual nationals, or even people of Chinese heritage and their family members may be at heightened risk of facing exit bans or arbitrary detention, experts say.

“There have been cases where the Chinese government does tend to regard ethnic Chinese as Chinese, even if their citizen documents say otherwise,” says Gabriel Wildau, China political risk analyst at Teneo, a global CEO consulting and advisory firm. “We’ve had cases where … the family members of Chinese people who are under investigation or fugitives are held as sort of hostages, subject to exit bans in China, as a means of leverage to try to get the actual target of the corruption investigation or the actual fugitive to return.”

Despite the heightened risks of business travel to China, Wildau says for the most part, travel to China is safe.

“Things have gotten a bit worse, but perceptions have outstripped the reality in terms of how bad things are,” he says. “Thousands of people enter and exit every month without incident. There are a few high-profile incidents that have gotten people’s attention, rightfully so. But I think to some extent, focusing on those incidents obscures the bigger picture, which is that for … the vast majority of people in the vast majority of situations, there’s no problem.”

Wildau, who regularly visits China for work himself, says that China is also granting more business visas than ever, including 10-year visas, and some countries experience visa-free travel to the country.

For business people planning to travel to China, these are some of the considerations before going, according to experts:

Consider your risk level. People linked to adversarial foreign governments, or working in sensitive industries, such as avionics, defense-related industries, or human rights law, may be at heightened risk of scrutiny.

Use a VPN. Though not foolproof, a virtual private network can protect your search history and provide access to websites blocked by the Great Firewall.

Protect your devices. Sophistical surveillance and tracking technology has opened up phones and other devices to monitoring. Consider bringing a burner phone if you wish to protect the contents of your device.

Check your documents. Make sure your passport and visa are up to date to avoid extra scrutiny or detention at Chinese customs.

Post-trip protocol. Assume that any devices taken to China have been compromised and have your company’s IT department do a thorough search for any malicious software.