Thailand’s Prime Minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, is expected to address concerns Chinese tourists have around safety in her country when meeting with President Xi Jinping this week, according to multiple media reports. China is Thailand’s biggest source of visitors.
Her four-day visit follows the kidnapping of Chinese actor Wang Xing, who flew to Bangkok for what he believed was a casting call in January. Instead, he was driven across the border, into Myanmar, and forced to work in a cyber-scam centre – a fate that has befallen hundreds if not thousands of his compatriots. Rescued by Thai authorities four days later, Wang’s trafficking ordeal has reportedly made many people rethink their plans to visit Thailand.
According to the news agency AFP, around 10,000 Chinese nationals cancelled trips to the Southeast Asian country during the Lunar New Year holiday. Citing a note from Thailand’s Kasikornbank, AFP said that Chinese visitor numbers could be down by about 17.7 percent this holiday period when compared to last year’s.
In one of several efforts to combat the trend, the Thai government recently published an AI-generated video of Shinawatra insisting that Thailand was, in fact, safe for Chinese tourists. In it, the prime minister spoke Mandarin, a language she doesn’t speak in real life.
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Telecom and internet scam centres like the one Wang was taken to tend to be operated by Chinese criminal syndicates based in Myanmar and Cambodia. Many of their victims are also Chinese, and trafficked to those countries via Thailand.
Thai authorities have already helped return about 900 Chinese nationals home from war-riven Myanmar, having removed them from compounds where they work to convince Chinese-speakers around the world to invest in fraudulent crypto-currency schemes.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, told Deutsche Welle that the centres were “threatening Thailand’s tourism and hospitality industries” by scaring off Chinese tourists. Nevertheless, Thailand still predicts that nine million Chinese will visit the country this year, making up almost a quarter of total international arrivals forecasted for 2025.
Shinawatra is also expected to promote more cultural exchanges between Thailand and China, along with the strengthening of the two countries’ economic and investment ties, Chinese state media reported.
