Discretion under competition: Exploring the visa marketing and visa dumping practices of Schengen consulates in China

This paper addresses the implementation of the Schengen visa policy in China in a context characterized by strong competition among European Union (EU) Member States to attract tourists through the issuance of short-stay visas. Visas have been studied as a means to preventing unsolicited immigration and consulates as a “first line of defence against undesirables” (Torpey 1998, 252). Street-level scholars have highlighted how frontline workers routinely process visa applications with suspicion and use their bureaucratic autonomy to enforce tighter border controls (Alpes et Spire 2014; Infantino 2019a; Zampagni 2016; Satzewich 2015; Scheel 2019). Furthermore, the implementation of a common visa policy by national consulates has led to the emergence of local communities of practice, where knowledge and expertise are exchanged to form a common understanding of migration risks (Infantino 2019b). Little is known, however, about visa implementation practices aimed at increasing visitor numbers to a destination, as is the case in China, which became the world’s top tourism source market in 2012. With an average spend of $1,000 a day, Chinese visitors are increasingly being targeted and courted by EU Member States’ tourism industries. Therefore, this paper attempts to discuss, in a relational approach, how visa issuance practices are affected by competition. Based on a two-month ethnographic survey in Beijing, China in 2019, the paper focuses on the implementation practices of French visa service. It explains how those are shaped not only by organizational constraints, but also by rules and practices of other actors and competitors, namely other Schengen consulates targeting the same tourism market (primarily Italy and Switzerland) and local Chinese travel agencies in charge with lodging visa applications. To describe this continuum of competitive implementation practices in a relational approach, I develop the concepts of “visa marketing” and “visa dumping”. Visa marketing refers to the use of visa procedures (reception conditions, reliability, processing speed, etc.) by consulates as sales arguments to advertise the destination they represent. Visa marketing practices sometimes turn into visa dumping practices when consulates circumvent the common Schengen rules and procedures to gain competitiveness and increase their shares in the Chinese tourism market. The paper focuses on two sets of practices: the use of visa application centres (VAC) as a selling point for the destination and the reduction of processing times of visa applications to attract prospective visitors. Overall, the paper shows that visa marketing and visa dumping practices are deployed in response to and anticipation of the practices of other actors, whether they are the result of observation or suspicion. The competitive implementation of Schengen visas in China, therefore, shows in a different light the complex interdependence between Member States, tied by common rules but driven by competing national interests, as well as with the growing number of non-state actors involved in implementation (VAC, travel agencies, etc.).