Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Chinese nationals as Travellers or tourists to Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from Reuters, that is reuters.com, the article is titled: Thailand, China to waive visas for each other's citizens from March. Quoting directly: "Thailand and China will permanently waive visa requirements for each other's citizens from March, Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said on Tuesday. Southeast Asia's second largest economy, which relies heavily on tourism, in September waived entry requirements for Chinese tourists until February of this year." 

So just for some background here, yeah they went ahead and basically gave Chinese nationals a Visa exemption going back into September but the presumption was that this would end beginning March 1 of 2024. But now it appears and from the context of the article, I can't quite tell if this is finalized, it looks like it is, that Chinese nationals are going to have a permanent visa exemption here to Thailand; they are going to be able to get a visa exemption not dissimilar from for example American passports which currently get 30 days, although I do believe Chinese are going to receive 15 days in terms of an exemption. We will keep you updated on that as that evolves as we see the terms evolve. But yeah, long story short, what we are looking at here is a situation wherein this visa exemption is going to continue apparently into perpetuity, or at least into the reasonably foreseeable future. 

Now someone who sent me this article or put me on to this kind of thought that I would have some big issue with this probably based on the fact that I made a recent video where I got pretty upset about the fact that Chinese police might be patrolling the streets here and some other issues associated with Thai commentary on the situation inside China. But leaving all of that aside, I think I kind of surprised this person because I was relatively ambivalent about this. In fact my response was, I was kind of surprised this didn't happen sooner. Quite honestly China is a big market and I do understand why relevant Thai officials would want to encourage tourists from that market. I mean China's entire middle class I believe at this point outnumbers the total population of the United States. Now that may be a little different here at the present moment as I understand China is going through some economic difficulties but again they have a massive middle class; we have seen in the past they have an interest in Thai tourism. 

Now the question posed is why this, and why now? One, Thailand has seen I think the benefits of visa exemptions, especially for tourism. Now again we are not talking visa exemption, just come here and live here, we are talking about tourism - come here, stay a short time, leave. That said, they have seen the benefit of it. Meanwhile and I am going to get into this in another video I am making contemporaneously with this one, biometrics and digitization have wildly and fundamentally changed Immigration Enforcement here in Thailand. So in the past, major markets like India and China, Thais were a little bit more reticent I think especially at an official level about folks from that big a market being able to sort of act as a deluge onto Thailand, sort of come in as some sort of hoard if you will and sort of overtake us all down here in a way. With the improvements of digitization and biometrics, Immigration Enforcement is more feasible now so I think this is one of the primary reasons why we are seeing this major shift toward a more permissive, a more exempt visa policy because folks that enter Thailand can be tracked, their status can be traced if you will and basically they can ascertain who's on overstay, they can detain them and they can deport them. So long story short, it will be interesting to watch how this impacts tourism overall here in Thailand, but we will keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.