Tourism as maritime statecraft: Hainan’s policy entrepreneurship in the South China Sea

This article examines how China’s South China Sea (SCS) tourism was formed, enacted and recalibrated over time. Drawing on multi-decade data, we show that SCS tourism was more than a top-down territorialisation strategy but also a socio-economic enterprise, reflecting both Beijing’s evolving foreign-policy calculations and the uneven weight of bureaucratic concerns and local lobbying. The Hainan government acted as a policy entrepreneur in advancing Paracel tourism and pursued a tourism hedging strategy. This research contributes to tourism geopolitics studies by bringing a multi-scalar, processual perspective and to SCS studies by offering a domestic political explanation of China’s maritime statecraft.