Schengen visa marketing in China: the street-level competition to attract tourists to Europe

ABSTRACT

Before COVID-19, visitors from China, were a prime target for the European tourism industries. Yet, their mobility was constrained by the Schengen visa requirement for any trip to a European Union (EU)’s Member States. While the literature on Schengen visa policy has highlighted the repressive practices of street-level bureaucrats processing visa applications abroad, this article seeks to understand how Schengen visa policy is implemented when the objective is to attract potential visitors rather than drive them away. The paper argues that the economic imperative to attract Chinese tourists to Europe is turning local consular cooperation from Schengen into local consular competition. To support this claim and using ethnographic methods as well as a relational approach to implementation, the paper develops the concept of visa marketing to analyse the race to attractiveness between French and Italian consulates based in Beijing, the capital of China. Visa marketing refers to the use of visa procedures (receipt conditions, reliability, processing speed, etc.) by consulates as sales arguments to advertise the destination they represent. In essence, the article presents a case of domestic actors appropriating common visa regimes, engaging in competition to entice foreign consumers to their territories.

KEYWORDS:

• Visa policy
• Schengen local cooperation
• China
• discretion
• border bureaucracies

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mireille Paquet, Catherine Xhardez, Antje Ellerman and Clément Fontan for their generous and insightful comments on the draft versions of this paper. Additionally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for helping me improve the quality of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Regulation 2018/1806 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 November 2018 listing the third countries whose nationals must be in possession of visas when crossing the external borders and those whose nationals are exempt from that requirement.

2 The Schengen countries include 23 EU Member States (all of them except Bulgaria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Romania) and 4 non-EU States (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland).

3 Regulation 810/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 July 2009 establishing a Community Code on Visas (Visa Code).

4 The case studies of Schengen visa implementation are all situated in Middle East and North African region (Infantino 2019; Spire 2008; Scheel 2018) and in West Africa (Alpes 2017; Zampagni 2016).

5 The exact period of the fieldwork is not specified to ensure additional confidentiality of the respondents. This study was approved by the Université de Montréal’s ethical committee (certificate no. CERAS-2018-19-115-D).

6 This article is based on a doctoral project comparing Schengen visa issuance practices in China and in Algeria, defended at Université de Montréal in 2022.

7 Visa agents: France (3), Italy (1), Belgium (3), Netherlands (1) Norway (2), Spain (2), Switzerland (2)

Diplomatic officials: France (3), Italy (1), Delegation of the EU (1), IOM (1)

Heads of national tourism development agencies: France (1), Italy (1), Switzerland (2)

VAC Managers: France (1), Italy (2).

8 The rate of non-issued visa is a relevant indicator for assessing the level of perception of migration pressure by European actors: in China, it is at 3–5% for the studied period, whereas in North Africa countries such as Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, the average denial rate stands between 25% and 40%.

9 The results presented in this article are part of a completed doctoral thesis which compared Schengen visa implementation by French consulates in China and in Algeria using a multiscale analysis.

10 At the time of the fieldwork, the visa fee in force was 60 euros (article 16). As a result, the service fee could not exceed 30 euros (article 17). Since the entry into force of the Visa Code recast in February 2020, the visa fee is now 80 euros. As a result, providers can charge up to 40 euros for the standard service.

11 Depending on sources (consulates, VAC website), fees are alternatively expressed in euro or in renminbi, the official currency of the People’s Republic of China. To ease the understanding of the competition between the French and the Italian consulate, fees are all expressed in euro in this article.

12 Interview with a representative of VFS Global for Southeast Asia.

13 Infringement procedure INFR(2013/2257) against France, procedure closed on 18 June 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by Quebec’s Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture and by the Immigration Research Initiative based at Concordia University and ERIQA research centre.