Geopolitical Tensions, Chinese Tourism to South Korea, and Perceptions of Tourism Overcrowding: A Multilingual Text-Mining Study of 15,000 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Online Comments

Jinwoo Chae

EconStor Research Reports from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Geopolitical tensions between China and Japan may influence regional travel preferences, destination perceptions, and public discussions about tourism in East Asia. Against this background, South Korea represents a relevant case for examining how international political developments intersect with perceptions of tourism overcrowding, destination saturation, and social conflict. This study presents a multilingual text-mining analysis of 15,000 online comments, comprising 5,000 Chinese-language comments, 5,000 Japanese-language comments, and 5,000 Korean-language comments. The study examines how commenters discuss Chinese tourism to South Korea, whether geopolitical tensions are associated with changing destination preferences, and how tourism-related concerns differ across the three language communities. The research design combined multilingual text preprocessing, frequency analysis, keyword co-occurrence networks, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and content coding. The coding framework included geopolitical tensions, travel substitution, tourist overcrowding, infrastructure pressure, resident inconvenience, economic benefits, cultural conflict, anti-tourist sentiment, and destination-management responses. The results indicate that Chinese-language comments emphasized travel opportunities and destination accessibility, Japanese-language comments discussed regional political relations and comparative destination preferences, and Korean-language comments focused more heavily on urban congestion, resident inconvenience, and the economic implications of inbound tourism. These patterns were derived from the analysis of the 15,000 collected comments. The study provides a framework for investigating how geopolitical discourse and tourism saturation perceptions interact across languages, while emphasizing the need to distinguish verified political developments from online speculation and to avoid equating the views of individual commenters with those of entire national populations.geopolitical discourse and tourism saturation perceptions interact across languages, while emphasizing the need to distinguish verified political developments from online speculation and to avoid equating the views of individual commenters with those of entire national populations.

Keywords: China–Japan relations; Chinese tourists; South Korea; tourism overcrowding; overtourism; tourism saturation; geopolitical tensions; multilingual text mining; sentiment analysis; topic modeling; online comments; tourism management; destination image; social conflict; East Asian tourism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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