By Cat Barton (AFP – July 19, 2014)
For years Nguyen Huu Son has guided Chinese tourists around Vietnam’s popular coastal city Danang, but a bitter maritime dispute between Hanoi and Beijing means he is now out of work.Relations between the communist neighbours plunged to their lowest point in decades when Beijing moved a deep-sea oil rig into disputed waters in the South China Sea in early May, triggering deadly riots in Vietnam.
The rig has since been withdrawn. But the Chinese tourists have not returned.”It’s never been this bad before… My company has almost no customers, no work,” Son told AFP.Son’s salary has been cut by two-thirds, but he feels “embarrassed” to take even this reduced pay package as he knows his company is not making any money at all.”We focus on individual travellers, not tour groups, and 100 percent of them cancelled… I have nothing to do with my time,” he said, adding that he was mulling a change of career.
– Economic impact –
– Tourism politics –
The fall in Chinese arrivals after the maritime dispute erupted is understandable as Beijing uses outbound tourism as a “negative sanction”, according to Tony Tse, a professor at the school of hotel and tourism management at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.”Outbound tourism can be used by the Chinese government to show its aggression,” he said in a 2013 paper, citing the examples of the Philippines and Japan — where tourism was hard hit after a 2012 dispute with the latter over the Senkaku islands, known as the Diaoyu in China.”The hostility in withholding tourism acts like a punishment and China is powerful enough to exercise this kind of sanction,” Tse wrote in the paper on how China uses outbound tourism as a form of diplomacy.Vietnamese tourists have also been cancelling trips to China in droves, although the government has not issued any travel warning, said one travel agent who declined to be named.”It’s a way to express patriotism. Vietnamese like travelling in China… but now they cancel to show their patriotism,” he said.
Tran Thi Lan, 54, a primary school teacher from central Nghe An province, had booked a trip to China for this summer which she was “very excited” about. “We decided to cancel, not the tour operator. The Chinese government’s behaviour was unacceptable,” she told AFP. “We decided not to go to show our attitude… We don’t want to go on holiday to a country that is invading our waters,” she said.