Two women from China walked into the Ermenegildo Zegna menswear salon on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue clutching Gucci and Fendi shopping bags.

They walked out with two blazers, two cotton shirts and a wool sweater, their purses lighter by $4,000 in cash.

"By now we know the Chinese buying power," says store manager Franco Salhi. "We understand they're richer now, and they travel more and spend more."

U.S. merchants and travelindustry officials wish they were seeing more of these visitors. As China's growing economy creates a new middle class, more Chinese tourists are venturing beyond Asia.

The United States, though, is missing out on billions of dollars of this business, travelindustry officials say, because Chinese tourists find U.S. visa rules more restrictive than those of other Western countries.

"We should view our visa restrictions the same way we view any trade barrier, because these tourists wind up spending lots of money in Asia, France, England and Germany when they could be vacationing here," says Rick Webster, director of government relations for the Travel Industry Association of America, based in Washington.

China represents the world's fastest-growing travel market. More than 19 million of its 1.3 billion people took international trips in 2004, according to the TIA. The World Tourism Organization says at least 100 million a year will venture abroad by 2020. (All figures exclude Hong Kong residents.)

Of those who traveled beyond Asia in 2003, 80 percent went to European countries. Italy received 605,527 Chinese visitors. In contrast, the United States hosted 157,326.

Changing just some visa rules and lifting some restrictions would boost the number of Chinese visitors to the United States fivefold to 1 million a year by 2015, says Adam Sacks, a travel economist for Global Insight, a Philadelphia research and consulting group that advises the U.S. Commerce Department.

Sacks' suggestions: Raise the number of application sites and of consulate workers processing visas. Reduce the $100 nonrefundable application fee. Drop the interview requirement in some cases. Simplify the application and the documentation.

Most important, eliminate the assumption in visa policy that Chinese tourists don't plan to return home — that they actually want to immigrate to the U.S. This legal presumption tends to raise the number of rejected applications. It also nettles Chinese tourists and government officials in Beijing.

China cites the presumption and interview requirements as reasons for Beijing's refusal to grant the United States "approved-destination status," as it has with about 60 countries. This status allows travel agencies to promote and package group tours, the preferred travel arrangement of most Chinese vacationers, Webster says.

"This is one area where U.S. policy has taken dead aim and shot itself in the foot," says Kenneth Lieberthal, professor of Chinese political studies at the University of Michigan.

State officials in Hawai'i have been lobbying federal and Chinese authorities to ease visa restrictions for tourists, but that is not expected to happen soon. In the meantime, Hawai'i this year opened a Beijing office aimed at luring new business, the second U.S. state after Nevada to do so.

"It's very difficult, almost impossible, to get a tourist visa to the United States," says Jian Hua Li, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington. "Many don't even try because we know we can't get in."

Those who get a visa usually do so after proving with documents that their travel is work- or government-related or that they have a strong motivation to return home, Chinese visitors and U.S. travel-industry representatives say.

The United States hosted 202,544 Chinese nationals in 2004, down from the 249,400 who came in 2000, according to the Commerce Department. Travel economist Sacks attributed the drop to fears about air-travel safety and restrictions imposed by the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as the SARS epidemic, a strong dollar, and competition from Asian and European destinations.

Zhao Yuefeng, a 45-year-old Shanghai restaurant owner, says she and her husband helped their visa chances by stating their visit's purpose as business, using a letter from a New York Chinese restaurant as proof. Their six-week visit gave them a chance to see an adopted daughter.

They shopped at Macy's and bought $325 worth of ginseng and shark oil in Chinatown, citing better buys than they could find in Shanghai. They spent more than $5,000, Zhao says.

At a Christian Dior shop in Manhattan, saleswoman Daria Tomasch recalled the wife of a businessman from Shanghai who walked into the store wearing a simple T-shirt and a "gorgeous" diamond-studded Piaget wristwatch and walked out with a $4,000 silk Hippy Chic evening dress, a $795 Malice Trotter wristwatch and a $560 handbag by Romantique.

At Prada's Madison Avenue store, sales associate Alexander Janik says a fortysomething woman from Shanghai came by last July, pulled an American Express card from her white Chanel handbag, and bought a $2,825 black-silk suit jacket.