China’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holiday saw a surge in inbound tourism, with foreign visitors increasingly adopting Chinese mobile payment tools as part of their travel experience. This has bolstered tourism-related consumption and injected fresh momentum into the country’s economic growth. Alipay, the digital payment arm of Chinese financial tech company Ant Group, showed that spending by inbound tourists on the platform rose by nearly 40% during the first five days of the holiday compared to the same period last year. Overseas visitors increasingly opted for convenient and contactless payments enabled by Alipay’s “Tap to Pay” feature, with the transaction volume surging 500 percent year-on-year. Dining, tourism, offline retail, and transportation were the most popular spending categories among inbound tourists during the eight-day holiday that ended on Wednesday. Alipay reported that foreign visitors’ expenditure on retail brands soared more than 200 percent from a year earlier. During the Golden Week break, destinations where international visitors used their mobile phones to shop most included Shanghai, Guangdong province’s Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and Beijing. Under the guidance of authorities, Alipay has partnered with tax refund agencies to launch an innovative tax refund service in several popular destinations such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen for overseas tourists.