Hawaii’s tourism industry is looking increasingly to China for providing much of its growth in the years ahead, and the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to be held here in November could play an important role. Travel leaders from China and the United States spoke at a summit at Kailua-Kona last weekend of China’s outbound travel market to the U.S. possibly growing to 5 million visitors in 2015, from less than 1 million last year.

A critical ingredient of such growth is loosening visa restrictions and increasing direct flights. The proposed visa changes include an increase in consular officers, which would more than pay for itself; one visa processing officer generates $1.5 million in fees a year.

The U.S. Senate has advanced legislation that would add merely 20 new consular officers to the little more than 100 presently and other measures that would speed visa processing in China. That proposal is far too modest.

The newly created U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board called this month for an addition of “a few hundred visa processing officers in key emerging countries to reduce wait time and meet growing demand,” plus four to six more visa processing locations in China, Brazil and India.

The group urges the State Department to establish a maximum waiting time of five days for visa processing at one of the few consular posts in China, down from as much as two months that Chinese visitors now must wait to obtain a visa. It also proposed that non-immigrant visas for Chinese be valid for 10 years, which Canada granted recently to Chinese visitors. Roger Dow, head of the U.S. Travel Association, suggested at the Kailua-Kona meeting that required face-to-face interviews of Chinese be eliminated.

“Visa reform is a critical issue for Hawaii China travel,” Lt. Gov. Brian Schatz told the Star-Advertiser’s Allison Schaefers. “It’s the greatest impediment to future progress.”

With elimination of visa problems, he added, “growth from that market could be astronomical.”

Of the 801,738 Chinese citizens who visited last year, 62,032 visited Hawaii. Despite visa and flight limitations, said Mike McCartney, executive director of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, Hawaii visitors from China are expected to exceed 90,000 this year, compared with an unusually low 1.2 million from Japan.

McCartney said he believes that “China will become a major market for Hawaii. Right now, it’s like Japan was 25 to 30 years ago.”

In November, important strides in that direction can be taken here at the APEC meeting, where leaders from 21 of the region’s largest economies will gather.

The meeting should be an important opportunity to emphasize the gains that can be made to reach a 2015 goal stated by Qiwei Shao, chairman of the China National Tourism Association, for “tourist flows between China and the U.S. to reach 5 million.”

Achieving that goal would be an extraordinary addition to Hawaii’s economy.