When China turns off the tourists, who pays?

Ten years of Chinese outbound tourism

Every politically motivated restriction China placed on its outbound tourists, 2015 to 2025. Collected, coded, and scored by me.

The database

There is no official list of these events. China has never formally admitted to using tourism as a coercive tool, so most episodes exist only as travel advisories, embassy notices, or quiet instructions to travel agencies that were reported at the time and then forgotten. I built this database because I could not find one anywhere else.

Evidence basis: tier 1 media and official government notices only. Politically motivated episodes are separated from safety-driven ones, which use the same instruments but are protection, not pressure.

Thailand: what a decade of exposure looks like

Data: Thailand Ministry of Tourism and Sports, compiled by year. 2020 to 2022 Chinese figures are near zero due to border closures.

From 2015 to 2019 Chinese arrivals grew from 7.9 to 11.1 million while holding a remarkably stable 27 to 28 per cent of all arrivals: more than one in four visitors to Thailand was Chinese, year after year. COVID took that to effectively zero. The recovery has been partial and is now going backwards: 6.7 million in 2024, then roughly 4.5 million in 2025, with the Chinese share nearly halved to 13.6 per cent, the year Malaysia overtook China as Thailand's largest source market.

The important part: Thailand's 2025 collapse involved no Chinese government instrument at all. No advisory, no ban. It was driven by safety narratives on Chinese social media after the kidnapping of a Chinese actor near the Thai border, alongside prices and competition from Vietnam and Japan. A country can suffer restriction-scale damage without ever being restricted, which is exactly why the distinction between what Beijing does and what Beijing merely benefits from runs through this whole project.

Patterns and surprising findings

Vulnerability beats everything

Every episode scoring 7 or higher hit a country where Chinese visitors were over 20 per cent of arrivals: South Korea, Taiwan twice, Palau, Japan. Every episode against a low-exposure country, under 5 per cent, scored 4 or lower regardless of instrument: the United States three times, Canada, Sweden, India, Turkey. The strongest evidence is Japan in November 2025: a mere advisory, the same instrument that failed repeatedly against the US, scored 7, with around 491,000 flight tickets cancelled within days, because Chinese visitors were over a fifth of Japan's arrivals. Who you target predicts success better than what you use.

Formal instruments are dying out

Only four episodes involved hard channel controls, all between 2017 and 2020. Twelve of sixteen were shadow measures: deniable advisories framed as safety concerns. Both 2025 episodes were purely shadow. China's method has evolved toward instruments it can always deny, and the Japan case shows deniable instruments now achieve what formal bans used to.

Does it actually work? Scoring a decade of coercion

Measuring effectiveness only by lost tourists misses the point: coercion is supposed to change another government's behaviour. So I evaluated each episode against three criteria: did China achieve a clear, intended political outcome; did the operation cause the intended fall in tourism and economic loss; and did China face meaningful backlash or countermeasures that undermined the gain. I excluded the four 2020 episodes, since COVID border closures make tourism effects impossible to isolate, leaving twelve.

That gives a clear success rate of 8.3 per cent, a weighted rate of 25 per cent counting mixed cases as half, and an operational effectiveness rate, meaning the tourism damage itself landed as intended, of 41.7 per cent. The gap between those last two numbers is the finding: China is good at causing pain and bad at converting pain into policy change. Pain is necessary but not sufficient.

Four cases that define the pattern

Who is exposed next

The database shows coercion works on exposed countries, so the obvious question is who is exposed now. I ranked the ten most China-dependent tourism markets by the Chinese share of their 2025 arrivals, then assessed how much total leverage Beijing holds over each, adding trade dependence, debt, and investment.

Arrivals share alone understates the picture: Laos ranks only fifth on tourism yet first on my overall leverage index, because around half its debt service is owed to China. Thailand sits tenth at 13.6 per cent, its dependence nearly halved since 2019 by the collapse itself, and diluted further by diversified trade with the US, Japan and the EU. The uncomfortable version of that sentence: Thailand's declining vulnerability was not achieved by policy. It was inflicted.

Why tourism and not soybeans?

There is a large academic literature on states weaponising trade in goods: Hirschman's National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade argued in 1945 that asymmetric trade dependence is political power, and Farrell and Newman's "weaponized interdependence" extends this to modern economic networks. Tourism barely appears in that literature. This section is my argument that it should.

First the raw numbers. For my ten countries I compared the estimated money Chinese tourists bring in against the value of commodity imports from China, calculated from 17 commodity categories in 2024 trade data. Commodities are larger in eight of ten cases; only in Palau and the Maldives does tourism money exceed commodity flows.

By value, then, tourism looks like the weaker lever. But I scored both channels against seven criteria of coercive usefulness, weighted by importance: substitutability, controllability, speed of impact, cost to the sender, deniability, targeting precision, and perception effects. Tourism wins four of the seven. It acts faster, since bookings can collapse overnight through a travel warning amplified on social media, where commodity flows have contracts and buffers; it is cheaper for the sender, hurting Chinese travellers' holiday plans rather than Chinese manufacturers' reputations as reliable suppliers; it is far more deniable, because a safety advisory never has to admit political intent, while an export restriction is visibly a state act; and it shapes perception, quietly rebranding the target as dangerous in the minds of millions. Commodities win on controllability and precision: goods move through customs, people make their own decisions.

The conclusion I draw is that tourism is not a smaller version of trade coercion. It is a different instrument with a different comparative advantage: speed, deniability, and narrative. That is why Beijing reaches for it first, and why the shift from formal bans to shadow advisories is not a softening but a refinement.

Behind the numbers

The database treats countries as units. This chapter is what one of those numbers, a collapse in Chinese demand, looks like from inside a hotel lobby, a restaurant floor, and a bakery kitchen in one border town.

Why Mae Sot

Mae Sot is not a tourist town, and that is exactly why it is useful. The Chinese presence here was never sightseeing: it was casino visitors crossing to Myanmar, traders, and businessmen, layered on an economy that runs on border trade. When national headlines talk about Chinese money, scam centres, and safety fears in Thailand, this is the place those stories physically touch. It is a contrast case: somewhere Chinese demand shapes livelihoods through channels that arrival statistics never capture.

How I worked

Semi-structured interviews, conducted online and in Thai, following a ten-question guide built around five core questions: what drives the business, how it compares with the Chinese peak, why they think the numbers fell, how Thailand is seen from abroad, and whether Thailand should depend less on Chinese visitors. Every respondent heard the same consent script. All three asked for their identities to be kept private, and I have honoured that: respondents are described by role rather than name, identifying details are withheld, and quotations are lightly reworded from my interview notes and left unattributed.

From the field notes

I interviewed people whose businesses sit at different distances from Chinese demand: a hotel that once filled half its rooms with Chinese guests, a hotel and restaurant that lived on high-spending visitors, and a bakery that never depended on them at all. That spread is deliberate. If exposure determines damage, these businesses should have lived through the same years very differently. They did.

What the interviews found

Two findings from this fieldwork feed straight back into the macro project: exposure determines damage at every scale, and the instrument is invisible from the ground. The next chapter puts the two layers side by side.

From Beijing's advisories to a Mae Sot pay packet

The database describes a mechanism operating at the level of states. The interviews describe what that mechanism feels like at the level of a shopfront. This chapter tests whether the second is a good description of the first, and asks what Thailand can actually do about it.

The chain

Everything in this project sits somewhere on one causal chain:

The value of doing both halves of the research is being able to see which links actually hold, and which break. Every one of them can:

Where the two layers agree, and where they don't

Putting the database and the interviews side by side produces three convergences and one honest disagreement.

What Thailand could actually do

Four directions, stated as options with their costs rather than as recommendations. Each draws on the database, the fieldwork, and arguments made in Thai public debate by tourism academics since the 2025 collapse.

How this research developed

The database publishes in full alongside my EPQ, and the fieldwork continues in Yaowarat, Bangkok's Chinatown, where the relationship between Chinese demand and Thai livelihoods is the conventional one. The step I cannot yet take is the comparison case: the same questions, asked of Vietnamese businesses on the receiving end of the same shift. This site will grow as the work does.