Gu Tingting was looking forward to seeing her grandfather and eating local cuisine in Beijing after a three-year absence in London, where she works for an energy company.

Im gonna cry, Im back in Beijing and will eat dumplings, lamb skewers, everything I like, said the 28-year old, who flew into the capital via Hong Kong.

Starting Sunday, China no longer requires quarantine for arrivals after authorities ditched the policy that, along with the exorbitant cost of air fares amid severe capacity constraints, was a major deterrent for travelers. While anyone wanting to enter the country will still need a 48-hour negative Covid test result, the substantial easing in border controls just two weeks before the Lunar New Year holiday marks an end to Beijings efforts to keep out the virus.

But the influx of travelers heading into the country is unlikely to be matched by a surge in demand for overseas trips. The flow of Chinese tourists, previously a $280 billion spending force in global holiday hotspots from Paris to Tokyo, will take months if not years to recover to its pre-pandemic level.

A raft of countries have implemented testing requirements on travelers from China after infections surged, and airlines have been reluctant to immediately make major changes to their flight schedules meaning capacity remains tight and prices high.

The willingness to travel has started to strongly rebound among Chinese, said Chen Xin, head of China leisure and transport research at UBS Securities. But it still takes time to be reflected in the outbound travel routes.

The reopening of Chinas borders marks the end of Covid Zero, a strategy that left the worlds second-biggest economy isolated for three years and weighed heavily on the economy. While the measures managed to keep the virus at bay for much of the pandemic as it killed millions elsewhere, they became increasingly irrelevant as the emergence of more infectious variants made stamping out the coronavirus all but impossible.

Royce flew into Shanghai from Hong Kong on Sunday after an almost month-long trip to Australia his first overseas journey in three years. He waited for four days in Hong Kong to avoid quarantine in the mainland. Royce, who operates an import-export business in Shanghai, plans to leave again for Europe next month to meet clients.

The reopening is extremely important for the economy, he said. For those three years it was shut down, the relationships with our partners in different countries just deteriorated. 

The government began rolling back quarantine, which was stretched arbitrarily by local authorities in parts of China to almost a month at some points in the pandemic, in June last year, with the pace of change quickening after China abruptly abandoned domestic Covid control measures like mass testing and lockdowns in the final months of 2022.

It is the last country to abolish border restrictions, more than a year after early Covid Zero proponents such as Singapore, Australia and New Zealand resumed quarantine-free international travel. 

The reopening wont bring much risk of a new outbreak because the BQ and XBB subvariants are still part of the omicron strain, Wu Zunyou, a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state broadcaster CCTV. Wu said China hasnt found any new mutation domestically.

Much of the initial inbound flow is expected to come from Hong Kong, through which many of the diaspora will travel given limited direct flights from global destinations to mainland cities. Theres been a rush to secure spots in the daily quota of about 60,000 people allowed to travel northward from the financial hub, including 50,000 via the land borders that separate the two places.

I havent been home in almost two years, so the announcement felt like a fever dream, said Connor Zhao, a 25-year-old consultant who lives in San Francisco. Hes currently on holiday in Bangkok and will fly to Qingdao on Jan. 19, with his trip including a layover in Hong Kong. 

Im very excited to see my parents. Getting to spend Chinese New Year with them means a lot to me, he said.

Hong Kongs leader John Lee said the next step would be lifting the quota, though he didnt provide any date. 

The government hopes to reach complete normalcy in terms of the mainland border reopening, Lee said on Sunday at the Lok Ma Chau station border control point. I hope it will be as soon as possible.

Olivia Wang is one who took immediate advantage of the border opening. The graduate student at the University of Hong Kong has been separated for three years from her partner, who lives in the neighboring city of Shenzhen. She has seen her partner, who she married in October, seven times in that period. Each visit she endured quarantine of up to 21 days.

I feel like a part of me is coming back to life, said Wang, who crossed into mainland China at Lok Ma Chau station. In the past years Ive felt alone and distressed, deprived of the chance to see my family.

As for the resumption of visitation by foreigners and business people to China, the requirement for a negative PCR test and practices like near-universal mask wearing may act as a deterrent in the near term. But for the first time since the virus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, China has rejoined the rest of the world.

With assistance from Luz Ding, Amanda Wang and Allen Wan.

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Patrick said he took it as a message to go to hell.

In turn, Patrick, a Republican, said it was time to consider holding the faculty accountable, by targeting one of the top perks of their jobs.

Maybe we need to look at tenure, Patrick said at a news conference in November.

Its a sentiment being echoed by conservative officials in red states across the country. The indefinite academic appointments that come with tenure the holy grail of university employment have faced review from lawmakers or state oversight boards in at least half a dozen states, often presented as bids to rein in academics with liberal views.

Tenure advocates are bracing for the possibility of new threats as lawmakers return to statehouses around the country.

The trend reflects how conservative scrutiny of instruction related to race, gender and sexuality has extended from schools to higher education. But budget considerations also play a role. Tenured faculty numbers have been declining even in more liberal states. Universities are hiring more part-time, adjunct instructors amid declines in financial support from state governments.

Traditionally, tenured professors can be terminated only under extreme circumstances, such as professional misconduct or a financial emergency. Advocates for tenure say it is a crucial component of academic freedom especially as controversy grows over scholarly discussions about history and identity.

Without tenure, faculty are liable to play it safe when it comes time to have a classroom discussion about a difficult topic, said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors.

But in difficult financial and political times, even tenured professors may not be guaranteed employment.

I may be fired for writing this

In Kansas, Emporia State University this fall cut 33 faculty most of them tenured using an emergency pandemic measure that allowed universities to bypass policies on staff terminations to balance budgets.

Max McCoy, Emporia States sole journalism professor, penned a column that began, I may be fired for writing this  before learning this would be his last year teaching at the school.

This is a purge, he said. He said all the fired professors were Democrats or liberal in our thinking.

University spokesperson Gwen Larson said individual professors were not targeted for dismissal. She said the cuts followed a review of how demand for academic programs is changing and where we needed to move in the future.

Attacks on higher education have been fueled by a shift in how conservatives see colleges and universities, said Jeremy Young, of the free-expression group PEN America. The share of Republicans and independent-leaning Republicans who said higher education was having a negative effect on the country grew from 37% to 59% from 2015 to 2019 in Pew Research Center polling.

In Texas, university administrators are working behind the scenes to squash anticipated legislation that would target tenure, fearful it will hurt recruitment, said Jeff Blodgett, president of the Texas Conference of AAUP.

Some people already arent applying for university jobs because of the discussions, said Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association.

In Florida, a federal judge in November blocked the Stop-WOKE Act, a law pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in colleges. The governors office is appealing the injunction. Compliance with the law would be part of the criteria for evaluating tenured professors under a review process that the university systems Board of Governors is weighing.

Theyve latched onto the idea that many totalitarian regimes have done over the years, which is if you can stop students from learning about ideas that a political party in power disagrees with, that is one way to stop those ideas from existing in the society at all, said Andrew Gothard, president of United Faculty of Florida.

An intellectual orthodoxy

DeSantis, though, has questioned the argument that tenure provides academic freedom.

If anything, its created more of an intellectual orthodoxy where people that have dissenting views, its harder for them to be tenured in the first place, he said at a news conference in April.

In Louisiana, lawmakers set up a task force to study tenure with the Republican-backed resolution noting that students should be confident that courses are free of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination. Professors raised concerns until they learned the task forces members were mostly tenure supporters.

In Georgia, the states Board of Regents approved a policy that made it easier to remove tenured faculty who have had a negative performance review. Elsewhere, legislation to ban or restrict tenure also has been introduced in recent years in Iowa, South Carolina and Mississippi, but failed to win passage.

The pushback follows decades of declining rates of tenured faculty. According to the AAUP, 24% of faculty members held full-time tenured appointments in fall 2020, compared with 39% in fall 1987, the first year for which directly comparable information is available.

Part-time college instructors rarely receive benefits. They frequently must travel from campus to campus to cobble together a living.

Its a nightmare, said Caprice Lawless, who wrote the Adjunct Cookbook, replete with recipes that poorly compensated Ph.D.s can cobble together with food pantry staples.

Ive taken Ph.D.s to foodbanks and watched them cry because they cant get enough food for their family, said Lawless, who said she served as a social worker of sorts before retiring two years ago from Front Range Community College in Westminster, Colorado.

The opposition to tenure has united conservatives for different reasons: Not all share the same concerns about woke higher education, said Marc Stein, a San Francisco State University history professor, who has written about the shift to part-time faculty.

But, he said, if you attack the wokeness of higher education and that leads to declining funding for higher education, then economic conservatives are happy.

Tenure exploded after World War II when it helped with recruitment as the GI Bill sent enrollment soaring, said Sol Gittleman, a former provost of Tufts University who has written on the issue. Lately, the country has overproduced Ph.D.s, said Gittleman, who predicts tenure will largely disappear in the coming decades outside the top 100 colleges and universities.

Critical race theory thats an excuse, he said. If there was a shortage of faculty, you wouldnt hear that.

It depends on who you ask at CES, where companies are showing off innovations that could immerse us deeper into virtual reality, otherwise known as VR.

The metaverse essentially a buzzword for three-dimensional virtual communities where people can meet, work and play was a key theme during the four-day tech gathering in Las Vegas that ends Sunday.

Taiwanese tech giant HTC unveiled a high-end VR headset that aims to compete with market leader Meta, and a slew of other companies and startups touted augmented reality glasses and sensory technologies that can help users feel and even smell in a virtual environment.

Among them, Vermont-based OVR Technology showcased a headset containing a cartridge with eight primary aromas that can be combined to create different scents. Its scheduled to be released later this year.

An earlier, business-focused version used primarily for marketing fragrances and beauty products is integrated into VR goggles and allows users to smell anything from a romantic bed of roses to a marshmallow roasting over a fire at a campsite.

The company says it aims to help consumers relax and is marketing the product, which comes with an app, as a sort of digital spa mixed with Instagram.

We are entering an era in which extended reality will drive commerce, entertainment, education, social connection, and wellbeing, the companys CEO and co-founder Aaron Wisniewski said in a statement. The quality of these experiences will be measured by how immersive and emotionally engaging they are. Scent imbues them with an unmatched power.

But more robust and immersive uses of scent and its close cousin, taste are still further away on the innovation spectrum. Experts say even VR technologies that are more accessible are in the early days of their development and too expensive for many consumers to purchase.

The numbers show theres waning interest. According to the research firm NPD Group, sales of VR headsets, which found popular use in gaming, declined by 2% last year, a sour note for companies betting big on more adoption.

Meta and others investing billions

Still, big companies like Microsoft and Meta are investing billions. And many others are joining the race to grab some market share in supporting technologies, including wearables that replicate touch.

Customers, though, arent always impressed by what they find. Ozan Ozaskinli, a tech consultant who traveled more than 29 hours from Istanbul to attend CES, suited up with yellow gloves and a black vest to test out a so-called haptics product, which relays sensations through buzzes and vibrations and stimulates our sense of touch.

Ozaskinli was attempting to punch in a code on a keypad that allowed him to pull a lever and unlock a box containing a shiny gemstone. But the experience was mostly a let down.

I think thats far from reality right now, Ozaskinli said. But if I was considering it to replace Zoom meetings, why not? At least you can feel something.

Proponents say widespread adoption of virtual reality will ultimately benefit different parts of society by essentially unlocking the ability to be with anyone, anywhere at anytime. Though its too early to know what these technologies can do once they fully mature, companies looking to achieve the most immersive experiences for users are welcoming them with open arms.

Aurora Townsend, the chief marketing officer at Flare, a company slated to launch a VR dating app called Planet Theta next month, said her team is building its app to incorporate more sensations like touch once the technology becomes more widely available on the consumer market.

Being able to feel the ground when youre walking with your partner, or holding their hands while youre doing that subtle ways we engage people will change once haptic technology is fully immersive in VR, Townsend said.

Still, its unlikely that many of these products will be widely used in the next few years, even in gaming, said Matthew Ball, a metaverse expert. Instead, he said the pioneers of adoption are likely to be fields that have higher budgets and more precise needs, such as bomb units using haptics and virtual reality to help with their work and others in the medical field.

In 2021, Johns Hopkins neurosurgeons said they used augmented reality to perform spinal fusion surgery and remove a cancerous tumor from a patients spine.

And optical technology from Lumus, an Israeli company that makes AR glasses, is already being used by underwater welders, fighter pilots and surgeons who want to monitor a patients vital signs or MRI scans during a procedure without having to look up at several screens, said David Goldman, vice president of marketing for the company.

Meanwhile, Xander, a Boston-based startup which makes smart glasses that display real-time captions of in-person conversations for people with hearing loss, will launch a pilot program with the U.S. Veterans Administration next month to test out some of its technology, said Alex Westner, the companys co-founder and CEO. He said the agency will allow veterans who have appointments for hearing loss or other audio issues to try out the glasses in some of their clinics. And if it goes well, the agency would likely become a customer, Westner said.

Elsewhere, big companies from Walmart to Nike have been launching different initiatives in virtual reality. But its unclear how much they can benefit during the early stages of the technology. The consulting firm McKinsey says the metaverse could generate up to $5 trillion by 2030. But outside of gaming, much of todays VR use remain somewhat of a marginal amusement, said Michael Kleeman, a tech strategist and visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego.

When people are promoting this, what they have to answer is wheres the value in this? Wheres the profit? Not whats fun, whats cute and whats interesting.

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The partygoers name was Mark, and he was interested in the tool Stein and his coworker developed to gauge emotional intelligence (the Emotional Quotient Inventory). He was also in search of a psychologist for a new reality TV show he was creating: A bunch of people isolated on an island, kicked off one by one every week. 

Stein was dubious, to say the least. 

First thing I said was, Whos gonna watch a show like that? he told Fortune. Looking back, he admits his prediction was off. That show was Survivor, which ended up winning seven Emmys. The partygoer happened to be none other than producer Mark Burnett.

Despite his doubts at the time, Stein decided to take the job as the shows psychologist, beginning his career in reality television psychology. Hes since worked in the field for more than 20 years, consulting for shows like The Amazing Race, Master Chef, and Big Brother Canada, which he works with the most these days. 

Its a psychologist side gig, of sorts: Stein, who is based in Toronto, is the founder of psychological assessment company Multi-Health Systems (MHS), a full-time job he juggles with being a reality TV psych for shows before and after they air. Working with larger-than-life characters and feeding the nations obsession with reality TV is a relatively new part of psychology. Its a fun gig, Stein fully admits, that many aspiring psychologists covetat least among the university students he gives talks to, who ask him when hell retire because they want his job. 

The consulting work is also a nice break from Steins past experience working with clients as a clinical psychologist. I spent my time working with people who are depressed and anxiousand all the usual psychological stuff, he says. And I think this time in my life, I want to have fun.

He spoke with Fortune about the ins and outs of his job, from choosing the cast to debriefing them while filming.

Picking out your favorite cast member

The villain you love to hate or the girl next door youre rooting for? Stein is responsible for putting them on your TV. Most of his job is concentrated around choosing contestants, a process he describes as similar to casting a Broadway playyou want all these different characters. 

One difference between choosing a reality tv star and selecting Lea Michelle to star in Funny Girl is the battery of psychological assessments, ranging from personality tests to IQ tests, that potential cast members have to take. Stein uses the results to rule out anyone who might not be a fit for reality TV. The assessments provide guidance on who might be a danger to others or themselves and who can handle the stress as well as fame and everything that goes with itlike being talked about by strangers on social media. Overall, they help him understand personalities. 

After reviewing the personality tests, Stein then interviews contestants to confirm the show is right for them and that theyre who they say they are. While the screening process is a casting tool for Stein, it can spark some revelatory moments for potential contestantsmany of whom Stein says lacked resources to ever get counseling, making him their first psychologist. 

He recalls a time when a contestant said she always felt different from the people she grew up with. After learning of her love for reading and how she felt she couldnt discuss her interests with friends, he explained what she was experiencing was likely due to her purported high IQ. She began to cry. Suddenly, I was able to explain a lot of things to her about her life that she didnt understand in a short time period, Stein says.

Other times, wild cards pop up, like the young woman who came in wearing a robe and carrying a plate with a dome-shaped cover for a cooking show. After dramatically revealing a cupcake to the producers, she twirled around to shrug off her robe, exposing a tiny bikini. As Stein tells it, she was escorted out.

Once contestants are green lit, Stein walks the producers through casting dynamics, such as potential situations cast members might fall into or how theyll react to each other. He says he likes to choose people that break stereotypes and defy audience expectations. 

But its the contestants who ultimately decide what character theyre coming into the game with. Theres not much production happening in the storyline, Stein asserts, likening it to candid camerathe situations might be set up, but the reactions are real. We want people who really seem to be badass. Part of what I gotta do is make sure theyre real, he continues. The reason people watch these shows is because the emotion is realThats what makes the show exciting, its real anger, its real sadness.

Walking cast members through the tough times

Over time, Steins role has evolved from just casting to providing debrief therapy sessions as cast members re-enter reality. Its peoples lives youre dealing with, as much as its fun and games, he says. [Theres] a serious part to it. And it can seriously affect their lives.

When he first started, he was usually warning contestants that reality TV wouldnt necessarily make their career or last too long. Now, he says the main issue is warning them about online hatred. Social media has really affected these shows. So I really have to prepare them for whats to come, he says, explaining that cast members may have thought they were great on the show and that they have fans, while the outside world actually hates them.

Stein is typically on set once a week when a show is filming, guiding people through the process. Thats especially important in the beginning, as they adjust to unnatural scenarios like living with 15 people, and in the end, when theyre starting to get tired and miss home. Telling the cast of a show that COVID lockdown was going to shutter production was one of Steins most difficult debriefs to date. I had to explain to each cast member that there was a pandemic, what that meant, and why they had to fly home as soon as possible, he says. There were a lot of tears and shattered dreams. I spent long hours in a nearly deserted studio debriefing each person.

The main priority is making sure everyone is safe, he says. Despite rumors of producer manipulation, he says, safety trumps entertainment. While Stein is on call, hes not always on set, so hes walked the producing crew through signs of distress since theyre there 24/7. He stays in contact with them every couple of days, making sure none of the cast members are showing any odd behaviors. One of his biggest challenges on set, he recalls, is when he had to debrief a popular cast member removed from a show for threats of violence.

But he usually only has to step in and consult contestants through their qualms three or four times over the course of a show. And some of those he talked into staying, he says, hes met again down the line.

They have thanked me so much for that memoryin spite of it being difficult, he says. And many of them have told me theyve grown as a result of experience.