Record numbers of Chinese travellers visited South Korea last year, with the pull of food and shopping trumping politics even after Beijing’s warnings that tourism would be hit by fallout from Seoul’s decision to install a US ballistic missile shield.
There were more than 3.8m Chinese tourist entries into South Korea in the four months following Seoul’s July decision to host the US’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system, a 27 per cent year-on-year increase. Chinese state media had said visitor numbers would plummet.
Some of the relative rise is explained by a drop in tourist demand caused by an outbreak of the Mers virus in 2015. But the 2016 figures are also a large increase over the same period in 2014, when South Korea welcomed about 2.3m Chinese tourists, according to official statistics.