Hot, boring, expensive: How some Chinese tourists view Singapore

Once a coveted destination for wide-eyed Chinese travellers, Singapore is now drawing some flak. What can it do to turn things around?

- Tan Dawn Wei

If you want to understand how Chinese tourists feel about Singapore, you don't have to dig through travel data or survey findings.

Just scroll through Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social media app that's part Instagram, part Pinterest and wholly fixated on documenting the travels and lifestyles of the young and mobile.

Since transplanting home six months ago from Beijing, where I was posted for more than six years, that app on my phone has been feeding me plenty of content on Singapore. There are photos of girls in flowy dresses gliding through Jewel's indoor waterfall at the airport; boys with mouths open wide "drinking" from the Merlion's water spout; couples with arm-heart poses under the arch at Sultan Mosque.

As you scroll, the visuals start to blur together. Xiaohongshu has become a mecca for travelogues and curated journeys, where Chinese travellers set out to recreate the same experiences and aesthetics, only to feed them straight back into the endless.

loop of identical stories.

The popular social media also has an artificial intelligence function, so for the sake of this column, I typed "Singapore travel guide", in Chinese, to see what it would churn out. The app summarised 1,118 notes for me and spat out a three-day itinerary that looked like this: Day 1: Fort Canning Park, Old Hill Street Police Station, National Gallery, Clarke Quay for dinner and a taste of Singapore nightlife, Merlion Park for views of Marina Bay Sands and Marina Bay with night lights.

• Day 2: Little India, Haji Lane, Gardens by the Bay for the Supertree light show, shopping at the Marina Bay Sands mall.

Day 3: Universal Studios, Singapore Oceanarium, Palawan Beach.

I dug deeper to see what Chinese tourists were recommending their compatriots as must-eats and must-buys, and there were no surprises there either.