The number of Chinese tourists visiting South Korea tumbled this year amid an unabated controversy over the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) deployment in South Korea, hitting hardest the country's tourism industry.
According to the justice ministry's immigration data cited last week by Yonhap news agency, the number of Chinese travelers to South Korea was 3,022,590 from January to August.
It was almost halved from the same period of last year. During the cited period, the tourists from Japan, the United States, Thailand and Russia all increased.
The sharp fall in Chinese tourists, which account for the largest portion of the total foreign visitors, led to a double-digit decline in overall foreign travelers to South Korea for the first eight months of this year.
Relations between South Korea and China, which were once depicted as better than ever in history, turned strained sharply since Seoul and Washington jointly announced the decision in July last year to deploy one THAAD battery in southeast of South Korea.
China has strongly opposed the U.S. missile shield installation as its radar peers deeply into the Chinese territory, damaging security interests of China and boosting arms race in the region.
South Korea has claimed it was aimed to defend against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s nuclear and missile attacks though the THAAD has little capability to intercept DPRK missiles targeting South Korea's territory.
Ordinary Chinese people refrained from going on a tour to South Korea amid the soured bilateral relations, inflicting the biggest damage on South Korea's tourism industry.
According to Hyundai Research Institute (HRI) estimates in May, the domestic economic think tank predicted an 8.5 trillion won (7.5 billion U.S. dollars) in losses to South Korea's economy in 2017 alone due to the controversy over the THAAD issue.
The losses were believed to account for about 0.5 percent of South Korea's nominal gross domestic product (GDP) this year, including 7.1 trillion won from tourism industry and 1.4 trillion won in exports.
Local duty-free shops, which had been crowded with Chinese tourists before the THAAD controversy, got silent this year even during the Chuseok holiday that had lasted for over a week through Monday.
Lotte Duty Free, the country's top operator of duty free stores, saw its sales from Chinese tourists tumble 25 percent for seven days from Oct. 1 compared with the same period of last year. It pulled down its overall sales by 15 percent in the cited period.
According to Yonhap report, construction of the duty-free shop complex at a main port of South Korea's southern resort island of Jeju was already completed in July, but it had yet to be opened amid the falling number of Chinese travelers.
No single Chinese cruise ship visited the port since mid-March. About 10 billion won was spent building the 6,453-sqaure-meter duty-free complex, according to the report.
From Jan. 1 to Oct. 9 this year, the number of Chinese visitors to the resort island stood at 667,935, sharply falling from 2,512,899 tallied in the same period of last year.(1 U.S. dollar equals 1136.4 S.Korean won)
