For decades, the pilgrimage route for ambitious tech founders, investors, and engineers led to Silicon Valley. Now, a growing number of them are flying to Shanghai, Hangzhou, or Shenzhen instead. Rest of World reports that China is seeing a surge in a new kind of tech tourism where visitors pay up to $9,000 for curated tours of electric-vehicle factories, robotaxis, and artificial intelligence and robotics companies. The trend is to some extent triggered by viral videos of China’s dancing humanoid robots and flying cars, which seems to suggest that the country may be moving faster than the West in key emerging technologies. As China-US tech competition intensifies, these trips are also becoming a means to explore the next investment opportunity and tech breakthrough.
“There’s a fear-of-missing-out dynamic at play: the sense that China’s tech ecosystem has reached a level of sophistication where not seeing it firsthand puts you at an informational disadvantage relative to competitors who have,” said Shaoyu Yuan, an international relations adjunct professor at New York University who specializes in China’s soft power. “If you’re building a startup or making investment decisions, reading about BYD’s vertical integration is one thing. Walking through the factory floor is another.”
Inside a Chinese Tech Tour
Named and marketed as “Shanghai AI and Robotics Innovation Tour” or “EV and Battery Deep Dive,” these tours are typically three to five days long. Visitors are taken inside factories, startup incubators, and industry conferences, and allowed private Q&A sessions with executives. Prices exclude flights but cover hotels, food, and commute. The companies featured on these tours are carefully chosen symbols of China’s technological rise: BYD, which overtook Tesla in global EV sales; Unitree Robotics, whose humanoid robots have gone viral online; and DeepSeek, the AI startup increasingly being compared to ChatGPT.
“They are a little bit expensive, to be honest,” said Chetan Shah, a Mumbai-based investor who has joined multiple China tech tours. “But there’s access to things I can’t buy. I can go as a tourist to visit BYD, but I will not be allowed to go beyond the showroom.” Shah, who manages his own family business, said seeing China’s manufacturing capabilities up close forced him to rethink some of his assumptions about global competitiveness. “I started comparing similar businesses in the Western world and in China and in India,” he said. “When I have been there in China, I realized that the cost at which China can manufacture is something that India can never compete with.” He said he later exited several investments that subsequently dropped by 40 to 50 percent.
A Cottage Industry Emerges
The demand has given rise to a new business category. In 2023, Boyang Shen moved to Shanghai after spending a decade as a business consultant in Europe, intending to start a market research and consulting firm. The business took an unexpected turn when two clients asked him to design custom tours around EVs and the livestreaming commerce industry. Realizing the potential, Shen applied for a tourism license and now runs an agency called GloPen in Shanghai. GloPen has hosted more than 1,000 visitors in 18 months. “There are many competitors in the consulting business,” Shen said, “but there is a gap in the market for an all-inclusive, immersive experience.” Most of GloPen’s clients are from Southeast Asia, India, and Europe, with smaller but notable demand from the US and Brazil.
Other operators are targeting younger audiences. Tech Buzz China, a research and analysis company, is targeting high school students with STEM backgrounds for its upcoming tech tour. Founder Rui Ma told Rest of World that most of the 32 attendees who have signed up are from the US, with the rest mainly from Singapore and India. The program brings interns from Chinese AI companies and early-career robotics students to speak with visiting parents and kids. “The point is we want parents to have the most up-to-date knowledge, to basically update their priors about what their kids could or should be studying,” Ma said. “If your kid is 16, it would be really helpful for them to learn what people are actually working on.”
From Premium to Mass Market
The tech tourism phenomenon is not confined to premium experiences. In Shenzhen, the top-ranked activity out of 104 options in early May on TripAdvisor was “Shenzhen Tech Tour: Explore the Future,” a $92 bilingual outing that includes a drone food delivery demonstration, a robotaxi ride, and visits to flagship stores selling AI glasses and AI-enabled toys. Companies themselves have grasped the opportunity: XPeng, the electric vehicle startup, has been selling tickets to its own showroom since January, and they are often sold out.
The economic foundation supporting this shift is substantial. According to reports cited by People’s Daily Online, industrial tourism currently makes up less than 5 percent of China’s total tourism output, compared to 10 to 15 percent globally. The sector is projected to expand at an average annual rate of 18 percent over the coming years, with the total market size expected to surpass 300 billion yuan ($44 billion) by 2029 or 2030.
China’s Soft-Power Dimension
Tech tourism also aligns with China’s broader soft-power strategy. High-profile visits, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz watching humanoid robots perform kung fu moves at Unitree Robotics in Hangzhou, leaders from Spain and Vietnam trying on AI glasses during state visits, have generated viral content that amplifies China’s technological image globally. In April 2025, American YouTuber iShowSpeed visited Shenzhen and rode a flying drone car; the video drew more than 600,000 views and was praised by Chinese state media. In May 2026, podcast host Lex Fridman announced he was visiting China to talk to “engineers at the heart of China’s AI revolution.”
Yuan describes the mechanism as a self-reinforcing cycle. “Someone sees Chinese tech content on TikTok or YouTube. That creates curiosity. Curiosity leads to a tour. The tour produces firsthand experience. The experience gets shared online as content. That content reaches new audiences and creates more curiosity,” he said. “Each rotation deepens the perception that China is a serious, perhaps leading, technological power. Whether you think that perception is accurate or inflated, the mechanism producing it is real and accelerating.”