x.com/TatenokaiGael/status/2114290082924409262
2 corrections found
China itself was completely closed until recently.
China was not "completely closed until recently": official Chinese sources say reform and opening began in 1978, and they record substantial international tourism in the 1980s and 1990s.
Full reasoning
This is too absolute to be accurate.
Official Chinese government sources say China began its "reform and opening" in 1978, and that tourism then "entered a stage of rapid development." An official embassy page states that by 2001 China "received 89.01 million tourists from overseas." That is not consistent with a country being "completely closed until recently."
A National Bureau of Statistics table also shows international tourists being received by major Chinese travel services throughout the reform era: 68.64 (×10,000 persons) in 1978, 97.24 in 1979, 118.19 in 1981, and continuing through the following decades. In other words, China was restrictive in many ways, but it was plainly not completely closed all the way until the recent past.
So the problem is the blanket wording: China did not remain totally shut off to foreign visitors until "recently"; official data show organized inbound tourism and large numbers of overseas visitors decades earlier.
2 sources
- Tourism in China
"Since the initiation of the policies of reform and opening to the outside world in 1978, tourism in China has entered a stage of rapid development." It adds: "In 2001 ... China received 89.01 million tourists from overseas."
- 18-10 Number of International Tourists Received by Major Travel Services
Official table (unit: 10,000 persons) lists international tourists received in multiple pre-2000 years, including 1978: 68.64, 1979: 97.24, 1981: 118.19, 1990: 131.00, 2000: 223.30.
South-East Asia was a no go zone pretty much as late as the turn of the millenium.
This overstates the situation. By 2000, Southeast Asia already had major mass-tourism destinations: UNWTO recorded 10.2 million international arrivals in Malaysia, 9.5 million in Thailand, and 5.1 million in Indonesia that year.
Full reasoning
This is incorrect as a blanket regional claim.
Around the turn of the millennium, Southeast Asia was not generally a "no go zone." UNWTO's 2001 tourism highlights reported that in 2000 the region included major international destinations with millions of foreign arrivals: Malaysia 10.222 million, Thailand 9.509 million, and Indonesia 5.064 million. Malaysia's own official tourism statistics likewise list 10,221,582 tourist arrivals in 2000.
Some countries in the region did have serious conflicts or instability in the 1990s, and Cambodia is a valid example of that. But the post's broader claim is about South-East Asia as a whole being a "no go zone" as late as 2000, and the official tourism figures contradict that characterization. A region attracting many millions of international visitors across multiple countries was not, in general, a no-go area.
2 sources
- WTO Highlights 2001
UNWTO's East Asia and the Pacific table for 2000 lists international tourist arrivals of Malaysia 10,222 (thousand), Thailand 9,509 (thousand), and Indonesia 5,064 (thousand).
- Tourist Arrivals & Receipts to Malaysia 2000-2019
Tourism Malaysia's official KPI document lists tourist arrivals in 2000 at 10,221,582.