The city that's not forbidden, just avoided

The number of foreign visitors to Beijing has been falling for several years, leading travel industry experts to examine ways of bringing them back, as Zhang Yuchen reports.

The airborne pollution that has shrouded Beijing in recent years and made headlines worldwide has long been a major concern for the city's residents, but now the problem has taken on an international flavor as foreign visitors shun the Chinese capital.

In April, the China National Tourism Administration published a report showing that in the first quarter of the year, 5.8 million foreign tourists visited China, compared with 6.04 million in the same period in 2013. However, only 800,000 visited Beijing, a fall of 10 percent from the first quarter of last year, which resulted in the city's total foreign exchange earnings falling to $23 billion, a year-on-year decline of 1.7 percent.