Public diplomacy as a determinant of bilateral tourism between the influencer and influencee countries: evidence from the Asia-Pacific region

ABSTRACT

This article explores whether and how a novel index of Chinese public diplomacy influences the flow of tourists between China and countries in the Asia-Pacific region from 2000 to 2019. Countries more actively influenced by Chinese public diplomatic activities are found to have supported a larger inbound and outbound tourists with China. Sister-cities relationship, exchange students, and informational contacts in our composite index are drivers of our finding. Our results contribute to expanding the knowledge on the informal political communication aspect of bilateral tourism determinationand the important role of public diplomacy in the hospitality and tourism context.

KEYWORDS:

• Public diplomacy
• China
• bilateral tourism
• sister cities
• exchange students
• informational events

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Professor Shuzhen Niu from Sanda University for providing help in collecting tourism and public diplomacy data used in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Appendix 1 for the list of EAP countries explored in this study.

2 See Table A1 and A2 in Appendix 2 for the results of the Factor Analysis and the Principal Component Analysis, respectively.

3 In addition, we resort to the least-squares dummy variable corrected estimation (LSDVC) technique to account for dynamics in a FE setup. This approach generates similar results.