The Chinese invasion is coming, and it’s not “against” Taiwan or anywhere else. Nor is it with guns and missiles. Rather, the world faces an onslaught of pent-up tourists. 

Communist China is suddenly opening up its doors for an exodus of the types of huge tour groups that once inundated nearby Asian countries and filled up flights to North America and Europe.

At the same time, Beijing is trying to prevent the vice president of Free China from leaving Taiwan, part of a larger effort to limit the island democracy’s role on the world stage.

The decision to authorize Chinese to go on group tours again after having banned them for years comes as the People’s Republic wallows in economic difficulties. Chinese travel agents, besieged by millions of would-be world travelers, have long demanded the government lighten up the restraints on foreign travel.

The restraints have been imposed for reasons ranging from Covid to revenge for sanctions to anger over deals some countries were making with Washington. The permission means that Chinese can go on discount group tours to 78 countries and regions that travelers in recent years could only see on costly individual trips — if at all.

Amid recriminations against Washington for President Biden’s order restricting or banning high-tech deals in China by American companies, America was named first for group tours on a list that also included other countries with which China has been at odds, such as Japan, South Korea, India, and Australia.

The Chinese Communist Party boss, President Xi, orchestrating a policy that mingles shows of rhetorical toughness with carefully measured concessions, authorized the group tours. He did so even as his regime is vowing vengeance and retribution in retaliation for Mr. Biden acting to block the theft of America’s high-tech secrets.

In response to America’s long overdue effort at stopping China from stealing technology for modernizing its armed forces, Beijing was also intensifying military exercises around Taiwan. So, this raises glaring questions, such as what do these gestures really mean, and should America and the rest of the free world be worried?

Global Times, the English-language organ of the Chinese Communist Party, of which Mr. Xi is general secretary, veered from ecstasy over the tour groups to indignation over Mr. Biden’s decision.

“Immediately following the announcement, searches for outbound travel jumped more than 20-fold on Chinese online travel platform Trip.com,” the paper reported. It said the daily average was more than 10 times the normal for the peak summer season.

That news came a day after the paper said Mr. Biden’s order on tech investment in China had “already caused harm to China-US relations, damaging the atmosphere of normal economic cooperation between China and the US, creating a significant chill.”

Dilating on that dismal demarche, Global Times warned that the “China containment and suppression faction has the upper hand in Washington.” America, the paper whinged, was “undermining not just the regular international economic and trade investment order but also causing greater harm” to America’s “own economic interests.”

In tandem with the rhetoric on all the harm Washington was inflicting on both Chinese and American interests, Beijing mounted a familiar campaign of intimidation coinciding with the itinerary of Taiwan’s vice president, Lai Ching-te. 

Mr. Lai was on his way to and from the inauguration on August 15 of Santiago Palacios as president of Paraguay, one of a dozen countries with which Taiwan has diplomatic relations.

China is incensed that Mr. Lai, a candidate for president in elections set for January, is stopping off at New York on Saturday on his way to Asuncio and at San Francisco on the return flight to Taipei. To show they mean business, the Chinese have sent warplanes inside Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone and navy vessels to the edge of Taiwan’s territorial waters.

Mr. Lai’s great offense, for the Chinese, is that, as leader of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, he’s in favor of greater freedom from mainland pressure. Beijing calls him a “secessionist,” one who wants Taiwan to declare itself as an independent country. For that, it’s widely believed Mr. Xi might order an invasion of Taiwan, but Mr. Lai doesn’t go quite that far.

That China is authorizing its citizens to sign up for group tours suggests, though, that Mr. Xi would prefer to focus on resolving domestic political and economic issues while engaging in what’s become almost routine intimidation ever since Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last August.

Mr. Biden, in what appeared as a response to his order on high technology, was sharply critical of China while at a fund-raiser in Utah. He called Communist China “a ticking time bomb” as a result of the decline of its economy, the world’s second largest after our own. China’s economy grew 8 percent last year but far less than that in the first half of this year.

None of which stops pleasure-seeking Chinese, whether searching out sights or searching for bargains, from yearning to see the world. It was eight years ago that China banned group tours to South Korea after Washington deployed — at a golf course south of Seoul — missiles for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. China also harassed Korean companies in China and cut off trade in certain products.

Until then, lines of Chinese tourists had filled South Korean department stores. Chinese-speaking guides at tourist booths answered questions and proffered advice. All that suddenly stopped when Chinese tourists could no longer travel in groups.

So fearful of democracy are the commissars at Beijing that, under the latest rules, Chinese tourists won’t be able to join groups to one important destination, namely the Republic of China on Taiwan. The People’s Republic has been claiming Taiwan as its own ever since the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, led his defeated army to the island as Mao Zedong’s Red Army was taking over the mainland in 1949.

Taiwan is now a freely democratic state with multiparty elections and a robust economy, and it is a fabulous tourist destination, which is in sharp relief in the light of the exclusions on mainlanders traveling to the island.

“Taiwan’s exclusion from the list is the result of deteriorating cross-strait relations and a lack of mutual trust,” one Taiwan tour operator lamented to the Taipei Times. “Both sides,” he said, “have already missed two great opportunities to break the ice and communicate with one another.”