SYDNEY - The number of Chinese visitors to Australia has tripled over the last ten years, according to figures released on Wednesday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

The ABS says China has become Australia's second largest source of overseas tourists, with one in ten visitors coming from there.

The ABS figures showed 630,000 visits to Australia in 2012 were from China, a big jump from 190,000 in 2002.

Asian countries such as China, India, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea are in Australia's top ten visitors list.

"New Zealand remains our biggest source of overseas short-term visitor arrivals with 1.2 million trips in 2012 or one in five visitors coming from there, but China is now in second place with one in ten, followed by the UK, the USA and Japan," ABS Assistant Director of Demography Neil Scott said in a statement.

"The top five countries alone provided more than half of last year's overseas visitors, and there were an extra 85,000 visits from China - an increase of 16 percent."