ABSTRACT

This research paper seeks to analyze the impact of China’s zero-COVID–19 policy on ASEAN’s tourism sector. As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic entered its third year, virus-stricken countries continue to deploy a variety of strategies aiming to find a delicate balance between protecting their economies on the one hand, and shielding their national health systems, which have been under sustained pressure, on the other. In this regard, China appears to have embarked on a very different course. By employing a zero-COVID–19 set of policies, it intends to provide its vast population with certainty in the face of a constantly mutating coronavirus. By doing so, however, China unwittingly exposes its economy to disruptions stemming from these policies designed to counter the coronavirus. These disruptions became evident in early 2020, and then again in late 2021, as they exacerbated global supply chain problems. The purpose of this research paper is to shed some light on the international implications of China’s policies with regard to the coronavirus in general, and analyze the detrimental effects of its zero-COVID–19 policy on ASEAN’s tourism in particular. The paper contends that if ASEAN’s tourism greatly benefited from the arrival of millions of Chinese tourists into the region in pre-pandemic times, their prolonged absence – a phenomenon attributed to China’s zero-COVID–19 policy – is now weighing on the bloc’s tourism. Although the lack of field data on Chinese tourism is a limitation of the present study, it also states that the longer China is willing to adhere to its zero-COVID–19 strategy, the more difficult it will be for ASEAN to engineer the full-scale recovery of its embattled tourism industry.

Keywords: ASEAN; Tourism; Coronavirus; China; Zero-COVID–19 policy