The Editor, Sir:

I read the piece carried in the commentary section of your paper on Saturday, April 19, by Ms Shellian Stamp from the beautiful parish of Portland, who essentially criticised the efforts of the tourism ministry to explore the possibility of getting more Chinese tourists to visit Jamaica. Ms Stamp believes this is a ludicrous idea.

It is Ms Stamp's position that a lot of the Chinese who come to Jamaica come not as tourists, but as small business entrepreneurs seeking to exploit Jamaicans in an effort to satisfy their economic interests? While this may currently be true and while I do not condone anyone within or coming to Jamaica, Chinese or otherwise, and failing to give maximum protection to our laws and customs, I believe Ms Stamp was being very myopic in her thinking or simply lacking awareness as regards China.

Opening up to the world

The fact of the matter is that the Chinese middle class has been growing exponentially over the years since China saw the wisdom in embracing globalisation and, therefore, opening up itself to the wider world, from which it is now deriving great economic benefits. Consequently, more and more Chinese have been able to acquire the kind of disposable income that allows them to, among other things, go out and explore the wider world.

According to a comment in 2006 from an official from the World Tourism Organisation, the growth in the Chinese outbound travel in the last five years was the highest in the world, being somewhere around 38 per cent a year. The New York Times reported in May 2006 that only about 4.5 million Chinese travelled overseas in 1995, compared to more than 31 million by 2005. And experts forecast that over 50 million Chinese tourists are expected to travel overseas by 2010 (61 million Americans were said to travel abroad in 2004), and more than 100 million Chinese tourists expected to travel abroad by 2020.

Problem

One of the problems where China is concerned are that the Chinese tend to visit six primary overseas markets - the United States, Russia, Thailand, Japan, Veitnam and South Korea. Europe, in recent years, has been attracting more Chinese tourists, with over 900,000 said to have visited in 2004 and a projection of a double-digit growth in numbers in the ensuing years. More and more countries are realising the benefits of attracting more tourists from China. And Jamaica should be among them.

We have obtained approved tourist destination status from China, giving us the platform on which to build. So, what Jamaica needs to do now is to ensure it taps into this increasingly lucrative tourism market by putting the mechanisms in place to attract Chinese visitors. And this is what I think Minister Bartlett is aiming to do, and which I hope Ms Stamp would see value in.

I am, etc.,

KEVIN KO SANGSTER

sangstek@msn.com

New Jersey

Via Go-Jamaica