By Matt Heller
It has become far too apparent recently that the People’s Republic of China, to be referred to simply as China, has far too much leverage over other countries in its efforts to eradicate support for the Republic of China, commonly regarded as Taiwan. Just recently, US air carriers acquiesced without incident to a Chinese ultimatum to drop any mention of Taiwan as a sovereign country. China’s ability to force foreign entities to accede with its policy demands is augmented by its ability to control its population and businesses more effectively than almost any other major power. Nowhere is this truer than with China’s control of its tourism industry, as the Chinese government has weaponized Chinese tourism to coerce states to give into its demands.
According to an article in The Economist, there were over 130 million international tourists from China in 2017, accounting for over $260 billion in spending, more than any other individual country. Chinese tourism is expected to continue considerable growth in tandem with China’s burgeoning middle class. And China wields near absolute control over its tourists by exercising strict oversight over all travel agencies (responsible for the majority of international Chinese travel) and by maintaining a list of acceptable countries for Chinese tourists to visit. This gives China immense leverage in cutting off this massive economic driver, especially over countries dependent on tourism.
One good example is the Dominican Republic, which switched its diplomatic recognition for the official Chinese government from Taiwan to the People’s Republic in 2018. In large part, this shift was due to promises by the Chinese government to increase the flow of tourists. China is able to use tourism as positive incentive for following China’s policy while countries opposed to China’s policy, such as Taiwan or the United States, find it difficult to respond with incentives of their own as they do not have the same control over where their tourists go as does China. For a tourism-dependent country like the Dominican Republic, an influx of new tourists presents a tantalizing increase in revenue and for China, the offer costs nothing. For another state to counter that and stop the defection of a nation to China’s sphere of influence, it would require a direct financial investment, one that a nation like Taiwan is often unable, and the United States unwilling, to provide.
Nowhere is the use of weaponized tourism more overt than in Palau, a small Pacific island state where tourism is one of the main economic drivers. Palau recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign country, and China recently barred its tourists from visiting Palau. This has resulted in a drop in airline bookings, a rise in empty hotel rooms, and a dramatically decrease in tourism revenues in a country where half of all tourists were Chinese. In this case, China is not offering to open up tourism to Palau, but instead is aggressively cutting Palau off to cause them economic pain. Perhaps the only reason Palau has not caved into Chinese demands for a change in diplomatic recognition is that the United States is still under agreement to provide funding until 2024, and Palau has historically relied heavily on American financial assistance. However, with American interest in the partnership dwindling and financial assistance’s ineffectiveness in growing the Palauan economy, it is likely only a matter of time before the island nation switches recognition to China.
Though Palau and the Dominican Republic are both small countries and the diplomatic recognition of China over Taiwan is a relatively trivial issue among more important international policies (most countries maintain de facto relations with both Chinas, including the US), China’s use of tourism to coerce policy change is still a threat to American and Western interests. At absolutely no cost to its government, China is able to offer a country a large financial investment that has the potential to grow, tying those countries economically to China and gradually bringing them under its influence. Though the weaponization of tourism is less effective against larger countries, as China’s ban on tourism to South Korea during the THAAD deployment had minimal effect, it is still a major threat as those small countries under China’s sway can provide much needed votes in the UN, potential locations for foreign military bases, and markets for foreign goods. Though today China is just leveraging these countries to switch recognition away from Taiwan, tomorrow it could be coercing them to vote in China’s favor at the UN or to open up their soil for military bases of a China ever readier to assert its influence in the world.
