Chinese money is transforming our favourite holiday destinations

Telegraph

14-04-2025

Tourism is worth more than $10 trillion (that's 10,000 billion) to the world economy every year. But is the Chinese Communist Party looking to carve off a bigger slice of that particular pie – and what might it mean for your next holiday?
The idea of China shaping your next getaway may sound fanciful to most travellers (unless you're heading to Shanghai or Beijing, of course).
But the Chinese government's increasingly ambitious strategy of international investments – otherwise known as the controversial Belt and Road Initiative – is increasingly expanding Beijing's presence in some of the world's most popular tourism spots.
The battle for the Maldives
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this phenomenon so far has been the Maldives. While best known to most British travellers as an archipelago of high-end resort islands, the destination's unique and isolated location has turned into a battleground for influence between China and one of its biggest strategic rivals, India.
'India has traditionally been very concerned about Chinese investment along the coast of the Indian Ocean,' says Jacob Gunther, from the Germany-based think tank MERICS (the Mercator Institute for China Studies). 'However, the investments in the Maldives have been particularly contentious, as they're right in the middle of the ocean itself.'
While India is keen to maintain a strong military presence in the ocean, China has been on a charm offensive, using its vast cash reserves to try to pry the Maldives away from its historic ally. While this investment spree might not be on the minds of tourists lazing in waterfront bungalows, it isn't entirely invisible either.
It was Chinese cash that funded the upgrade and expansion of Velana International Airport – the landing point for almost every single international tourist arriving in the Maldives. The Belt and Road Initiative (or BRI) also funded a massive, modern road bridge connecting the airport with Male – the Maldives' densely-populated capital city – as well as the slightly more tourist-friendly island of Hulhumalé. If you've crossed over out of curiosity to see the 'real' Maldives, you've almost certainly been on it.
Infrastructure investment is all well and good, but analysts fret that the Maldives is becoming indebted to China, which may then seek to take control of land and assets in the country in return. They point to the massive controversy surrounding China's investment into a new port in Sri Lanka – another tourist hotspot – which then fell into Beijing's hands when the South Asian country was unable to make its payments.
The port story goes to the heart of the mysteries surrounding the BRI, which is understood by most analysts as a way of China expanding trade routes while also peeling some countries away from the West.
'The BRI is both a geostrategic and commercial project, so a lot of the projects are a blend of those two aims,' says Mr Gunther, who has researched China's 'political economy' for more than a decade.
Empty skyscrapers and ghost airports
While the Maldives may have been one of the most contentious investments, the Chinese government and its state-backed enterprises have been making their presence felt in numerous other holiday destinations, spanning all the way from south-east Asia to the Adriatic Coast.
Sometimes these investments are explicitly focused on tourism projects. In Cambodia, Chinese investment has turned the unremarkable beach-town of Sihanoukville into an enclave of skyscrapers, some of them hosting plush Chinese casino resorts, but hundreds of them unfinished, creating a dystopian feel.
Some 300 miles away in Krong Siem Reap, the nearest city to Angkor Wat, China has ploughed $1.1 billion into a state-of-the-art airport.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been another hotspot, with China taking advantage of a Western retreat from the continent to bolster its influence. In 2023, African countries received more than $20 billion in investment via BRI deals, much of it going into energy and transport infrastructure.
Then there's the Caribbean, where a number of Commonwealth countries have signed BRI partnerships with Beijing, including Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. While the Caribbean governments have relished the chance to upgrade their infrastructure, the wave of Chinese funding – which has topped $9 billion across Latin America and the Caribbean – has led the US State Department to warn about the region becoming a 'Chinese lake'.
A European toehold
Closer to home, China has unnerved some Western governments by becoming a significant investor in parts of the Western Balkans, most notably the emerging tourism hotspot of Montenegro.
Alongside some hotel developments backed by private Chinese investors, Beijing has also embarked on creating a new motorway connecting the coastal towns of Budva and Tivat. The building splurge comes amid concerns that overdevelopment is spoiling the character of the region.
'China has an interest in some of the Balkan countries like Montenegro as it regards them as future EU states and thus a potential route for influence in future European decision-making,' says Vladimir Shopov, a BRI expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
What will it mean for tourists? To date, Chinese-backed tourism investments haven't proved massively successful. The ambitious project of Sihanoukville remains a ghost town, as does a similar project called Forest City in Malaysia. Those Western travellers who have used the new Siem Reap airport have been baffled to find it almost entirely empty.
The other possibility is that the BRI could result in more Chinese tourism. While outbound Chinese tourism was grounded by the pandemic, it has been rising in recent years, with the number of overseas trips taken by Chinese nationals projected to rise to 128 million by the end of 2028.
'A lot of countries are keen to get Chinese tourists, but there haven't necessarily been any explicit links between BRI investments and expanding tourism,' says Mr Shopov. 'If you look at Montenegro, tourism is still down on pre-pandemic levels, and Chinese tourism to Europe is still down significantly compared to 2019.'
'While tourism isn't a major focus for the BRI, there is often a link between countries which have strong trade links with China and those which receive a lot of Chinese tourism,' says Jacob Gunther from MERICS. Indeed, Chinese visitors to Cambodia rose some 55 per cent in 2024, although he cautions against attributing the increase entirely to any one factor.
Perhaps we shouldn't be expecting the CCP or its state-backed allies to displace the likes of Hilton or Marriott in their dominance of the tourism world any time soon.
But with Chinese influence increasing across the globe – including in the West – the chances of Beijing playing a role in your next holiday are probably nowhere near as remote as you think.