Third-world mass-tourism model rejected

By Bangkok officials, at least.

Thailand has 463 times the land area of Hong Kong, and a population nearly 10 times bigger – the kingdom has 363 people per square mile, versus Hong Kong’s 18,200. The kingdom’s nominal per capita GDP is a seventh of Hong Kong’s. Last year, Thailand had around 33 million tourist arrivals last year, while Hong Kong had nearly 50 million. 

Which of the two places wants to boost tourist arrivals, and which wants to curb the numbers?

Bloomberg (paywalled) reports…

The Southeast Asian nation, famed for its beaches and city nightlife, is only targeting about 33 million foreign visitors this year, well below the nearly 40 million who arrived in 2019.  

…“We’re not too worried about the number of tourists because we want to generate more revenue from each visitor,” [Thai tourism official] Nithee said. “We focus on quality markets.” 

We leave the riffraff to Hong Kong.

…The agency is targeting travelers drawn by medical care, wellness retreats, concerts, festivals, golf, marathons and other sporting events because these visitors tend to stay longer and spend more.

The agency’s website also leans heavily into the luxury and wellness angle…

…But with tourism accounting for about one-fifth of Thailand’s economy, the ecosystem of hotels, restaurants, food markets, transport operators, dive shops and tour companies which has sprung up around that depends on large volumes of visitors.

Thailand has the space – and the low-paid workforce – to accommodate more low-end tourists. But they think they can and should do better than that.

Some weekend reading…

From Postcolonial Politics, a short (by which the authors mean ‘long’) article on how Hong Kong has never decolonized.  The analysis has to produce results that support an ideology – so partly interesting, partly a bit loopy…

After the failure of the “Umbrella Movement” in 2014, localist and “anti-mainland” sentiment grew further and faster, pushing more young people to declare themselves “localists” in order to counter the increasing influence of the mainland Chinese government, and a new form of colonialism.  …demonstrators claimed the right of Hong Kong people to elect their own government and employed the argument of the specificity of Hong Kong’s socio-cultural identity. But where does this specificity come from? 

Wishing to avoid having a population that was either pro-CCP or pro-KMT, and unable or unwilling to Anglicize floods of new arrivals, the 1960s colonial government cunningly engaged in…

…the construction of a Hong Kong identity, based on an American and European-style consumer society. The worker, the producer must become the consumer. The political and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s therefore closely resembled the transformation of everyday life, especially in the sphere of leisure, which took place in Britain and Western Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s. It was above all the privatization of daily life, the withdrawal into the home and the family facilitated by the miniaturization of the media for the consumption of cultural products (transistors, inexpensive televisions, and later the audio cassette), which were significant for the construction of this new identity. Such privatization implied the fragmentation of collective life, especially with regard to workers and their unionization. 

It was nothing compared with what smartphones were to do. 

The authors are essentially seeing the 1967-97 development of a Hong Kong identity as a contrived plan to maintain British rule. Beijing officials would of course heartily agree. Certainly, administrations during that era laid on the ‘community’ stuff with gusto. But it was likely as much to do with keeping up with changing public attitudes as managing them. Hong Kong during that period was pretty much the freest society in Asia, and the local population had the opportunity and means to carve their own identity – and did. Leftists often find it hard to imagine that non-Westerners have their own minds. But they sort of anticipate this criticism…

In the construction of the Hong Kong identity, the worst aspect was the institutional denial of the agency of the Hong Kong people by the colonial authorities. In the twenty-first century, historical reality has constituted many parts of Asia as constituents of modernity and not merely its exploited objects. It is a modernity that bears the marks of colonialism, is full of contradictions, unfinished processes, turmoil and hybridity. But is it really any different from the rest of the modern world where women and the working classes constitute the domestic colonized? In Asia, these contradictions and consequences of capitalist development have simply been exacerbated causing a concomitant amplification of the human suffering and dilemmas that go hand in hand with urban capitalist industrialization in general.

Entertaining if you have nothing important to do.

War on the Rocks looks at the challenges of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan…

Three key missions at the heart of any cross-strait campaign have never been successfully executed under modern threat conditions: an amphibious landing against a credible coastal anti-ship missile threat, a large-scale airborne drop against modern air defenses, and a large, opposed air assault at extended range. In other words, the People’s Liberation Army would have to make history three times in the same campaign.  

…The familiar point is that invasion would be difficult. The sharper point is that Taiwan would not need to defeat the invasion force outright. It would only need enough surviving capability to disrupt the sequence. In a campaign built around tight timing and limited lift, the threshold for disruption is far lower than the threshold for destruction. China would have to move, land, reinforce, and sustain exposed forces under fire. Taiwan would only have to break that sequence.

Lift makes the problem more concrete: China would need to deploy sufficient combat power ashore in the opening hours to prevent the beachhead’s isolation before follow-on forces arrive. That makes amphibious lift central to the campaign. If China cannot meet that threshold in the opening waves, it must either accept a dangerously thin landing force or compensate with airborne and air assault operations. Those workarounds create the second and third Nevers.

Essentially, you can’t launch an invasion without large, slow ships and planes full of troops and equipment moving right up to the defenders. Unlike in the past, defenders today have numerous smaller and faster missiles and drones to mess things up.