Or let's say a foreigner goes to a restaurant to eat, and, finding no English menu, is forced to make his choices in either one of two ways: either point at pictures of dishes on the menu, or go inside the kitchen and point out the individual ingredients.

Both ways lead to hits and misses; pictures don't always reveal the type of meat in the dish, or whether a dish is spicy or sour or sweet, so the diner is likely to end up with something he doesn't like - perhaps intestines or pig's ears, or another foodstuff that's a delicacy for Chinese but distasteful for most foreigners. And if a foreigner points out the ingredients, he still has no influence on how the ingredients are cooked and what they are mixed with.

This is one example of how China remains distant: China has great food, but foreigners end up with dishes that don't impress them because they have no way of ordering what they like.

Yet it's easy for tourism departments to change this with direct measures by having each province set up a team that helps restaurants in tourist areas to design new menus that would have English translations (this is something that has been done in Beijing as part of the run-up to the Olympics).

Another thing that can be done is setting up a 24-hour hotline for tourists that would be modeled on the existing 114 hotline: tourists can call this hotline to find out transport options to wherever they want to go, the availability of hotels, addresses and opening hours of museums and other sights, and other similar things. Such a hotline would ensure a smoother and more rewarding experience in China.

The benefits of carrying out these changes can yield quick results in larger volumes of tourists, as the experience of provinces that have made some headway in this direction shows. For example, an official in Sichuan once asked me why Yunnan gets more foreign tourists than Sichuan, yet the latter had more spectacular mountains and more diverse attractions.