Lim Kok Cheong: Visa-free for all Chinese tourists to propel business opportunities

Nanyang Siang Pau, June 22, 2015

Sungai Siput, June 21 – President of the Associated Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Malaysia (ACCCIM) Dato’ Lim Kok Cheong urged the government to be more decisive and to treat all Chinese nationals equally so that they could enter Malaysia visa-free regardless of whether they are group travelers or individual tourists.

He said the visa-free measure taken by the government for Chinese tourists to enter Malaysia was not decisive.

He mentioned this in his speech delivered at the 9th anniversary dinner of the Sungai Siput affiliate of Perak Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry last night.

He suggested that the government set for two weeks to one month trial period for individual Chinese tourists.

“The retail business in many parts of the world were driven by Chinese tourists who have strong spending power, if all Chinese tourists were allow to come in visa-free, it will help to propel all the businesses in the country,” he said.

He pointed out that last year the outbound Chinese tourist had broken the 100 million records, the target is 500 million in five years. Compare to 4 million Chinese tourists flocking to Thailand last year and was expected to grow to 5 million this year, only more than 1 million Chinese nationals came to Malaysia for business trips, sightseeing and study.

He said last year following the MH370 incident the number of Chinese tourists had dropped, it was initially thought that the situation might be better this year, but for the first three months of this year, the number of Chinese tourists came to Malaysia had decreased by 20% compare with the same period last year.

“After visiting Guangdong province, I did write a letter to the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Tourism requesting the government to consider introducing visa-free measure for the Chinese tourists, if it is only free visa, the Chinese do not care about having to pay for the fees but they hate to face with the red tapes in applying for the visa,” he added.

He said tourism could drive many other industries like hotel industry, food and beverages, transportation etc. Today Chinese were the tourists of the world; they have strong purchasing power and would shop for things wherever they went. To them, sightseeing was second, shopping came first. This was in contrary with tourists from Western countries.

Original Source: 林国璋： 旅游业带动无限商机 应果敢开放中国人签证