On May 31, 2026, Singaporean media Lianhe Zaobao reported that Chinese local officials, for their own career advancement, pushed through poorly vetted massive tourism projects, leading to a succession of serious debt and desolation in various places.

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The article introduced the reality that the full-scale replica of the Titanic, on which construction began in 2014 in Daying County, Sichuan Province, with a planned investment of 1 billion yuan (approximately 23.5 billion yen), has been left unfinished with its hull rusted due to funding difficulties.

It also pointed out that in Dushan County, Guizhou Province, construction of "Tianxia Di Yi Shui Si Lou" (The World's No. 1 Shui Si Building), one of the world's largest pavilion structures modeled after the traditional styles of ethnic minorities, which began in 2016 with an investment of 200 million yuan (approximately 4.7 billion yen), also stopped due to funding problems. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China announced that Pan Zhili, who was then the secretary of the county party committee, had borrowed money to advance projects for his own achievements, and when Pan was stripped of his public office, Dushan County's debt had reached over 40 billion yuan (approximately 940 billion yen).

Furthermore, it was also mentioned that Dayong Ancient City (a historical tourism facility) in Zhangjiajie, Hunan Province, which was built with a total cost of approximately 2.4 billion yuan (approximately 56.4 billion yen), incurred cumulative losses of over 1 billion yuan (approximately 23.5 billion yen) during its four-year pre-opening period. The chairman of the operating company stated that "jumping on the bandwagon" by blindly following others' success stories was the cause of the failure.

"Wilderness Kingdom" theme park located in Lijiang City, Yunnan Province
Furthermore, it was reported that among approximately 27,000 ancient town-related tourism enterprises in China, about 40% are in abnormal conditions such as liquidation or suspension of operations, and many imitation tourist destinations are becoming ghost towns. It was explained that during the "tourism town" boom that occurred in various places around 2016, local governments formed partnerships with real estate developers with the aim of securing financial revenue through land sales, but this often resulted in neither the government's nor the developers' demands being met.

According to the article, Professor Tang Renwu of the Institute of Government Management, Beijing Normal University, argued that the root cause of the problem is that officials only think about highlighting their achievements during their tenure and do not adequately verify the effectiveness and value of projects. Professor Zhang Zhizhong of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kainan University in Taiwan, also analyzed that "even if the central government demands a correct view of performance, if the evaluation indicators for local officials do not change, the tendency to cling to construction projects as visible achievements is unlikely to change." (Edited and translated by Kawajiri)