Chetan Shah can walk into a BYD showroom as a tourist. He cannot walk onto the factory floor. That is why the Mumbai-based investor has paid for several China tech tours. "They are a little bit expensive, to be honest," he said. "But there's access to things I can't buy."
For decades, ambitious founders, investors, and engineers made a kind of pilgrimage to Silicon Valley. A growing number now fly to Shanghai, Hangzhou, or Shenzhen instead.
China has seen a surge in paid tech tours. Visitors spend up to $9,000 for three to five days inside electric-vehicle factories, driverless taxis, and artificial intelligence and robotics firms. The packages usually cover hotels, meals, and local transport, but not flights. They also include visits to startup hubs, industry conferences, and private talks with executives.
Viral videos of dancing humanoid robots and flying cars have fed the rush. Some visitors leave with the sense that China is moving especially fast in these new technologies. Shaoyu Yuan, an international relations professor at New York University, said a fear of missing out is at work. If you are building a startup or making an investment, he said, reading about how BYD builds cars in-house is one thing. Walking through the factory is another.
The companies on these tours are familiar names in this story: BYD, which overtook Tesla in global electric-car sales; Unitree Robotics, whose humanoid robots spread widely online; and DeepSeek, an AI startup often compared with ChatGPT.
The tours themselves have become a business. In 2023, Boyang Shen moved to Shanghai after a decade as a consultant in Europe, hoping to start a research firm. Two clients asked him to design trips around electric vehicles and livestream shopping. He later got a tourism license and now runs GloPen. In 18 months the agency has hosted more than 1,000 visitors. Consulting is crowded, he said. An all-in, on-the-ground trip was the gap.
Casual travelers are being offered a cheaper look. Travel sites now list dozens of tech tours. In May, the top-ranked activity among 104 options in Shenzhen was a $92 two-language tour: a drone food-delivery demo, a robotaxi ride, and stores selling AI glasses and AI-enabled toys. XPeng, an electric-car company, has been selling tickets to its own showroom since January, and they often sell out.
Yuan described a loop. Online clips spark curiosity. Curiosity leads to a tour. The visit is shared as new content, and more people want to see it for themselves. The product, in the end, is not a souvenir. It is standing on the factory floor.