China has an unfair advantage.
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The trade group representing the U.S. airline industry is asking the federal government to pause the expansion of passenger flights to China due to the “existing harmful anti-competitive policies of the Chinese government.”
Airlines for America, which represents the seven largest U.S. airlines, sent a letter on Thursday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claiming that the Chinese government has “effectively closed the market to U.S. carriers” since the Covid pandemic.
Neither the State Department nor the Department of Transportation immediately responded to Forbes’ requests for comment.
U.S. tourism officials have yearned for the return of Chinese tourists, who tend to be high spenders among global travelers. Before the pandemic, as many as three million Chinese travelers visited the United States annually, representing 4% of inbound traveler volume but accounting for 13% of total spending by foreign travelers. All told, pre-pandemic Chinese travelers had been injecting more than $30 billion annually into the U.S. economy.
Yet last year, fewer than 850,000 Chinese visited the U.S., according to the National Travel & Tourism Office (NTTO), the agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce that tracks tourism statistics. That 68% drop in traveler volume translated to more than $20 billion that Chinese visitors did not spend in the U.S.
The airline industry says it wants a level playing field. In the wake of the pandemic, “the Chinese implemented strict limits on market access, as well as imposing challenging rules effecting operations, customers and the treatment of our airline crew,” says the letter to Blinken and Buttigieg. “If the growth of the Chinese aviation market is allowed to continue unchecked and without concern for equality of access in the market, flights will continue to be relinquished to Chinese carriers at the expense of U.S. workers and businesses.”
Before inbound travel from China can fully bounce back, the volume of flights between the two countries—a number mutually decided by the governments—must continue to increase. The Biden administration recently increased the number of scheduled round trip flights that Chinese airlines can operate to the United States from 35 to 50 per week. That’s a big jump since last year, when only 12 flights were operating each way between the two countries per week, but it’s still about a third of the number of flights that had been flying between China and the U.S. in August 2019.
For U.S. airlines, a major sore point has been that Chinese airlines continue to fly over Russian airspace—something U.S. airlines have been barred from doing since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In February 2023, Reuters reported that two U.S. senators urged the Biden administration to ensure that no commercial airline arriving or departing from a U.S. airport can overfly Russian territory.
The issue continues to rankle U.S. airlines. “Even for those flights not operating through Russian airspace, there is still a competitive disadvantage with Chinese airlines enjoying certain protections stemming from the Chinese airline’s relationships with their government,” Airlines for America said in its letter.
