Research summary
The coverage was mostly neutral. The comment threads were not — and they ended at “I'm not going.”
Summarising the article
The Chinese media narrative of Thailand as a tourist destination after the legalisation of cannabis
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Smith Boonchutima, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pavel Slutskiy · Heliyon · 2023
The question
After Thailand legalised cannabis, how did Chinese-language media narrate the country as a travel destination, and did readers respond in the same direction as the coverage they were reading?
How it was done
A content analysis of 128 Weibo posts published between 2019 and 2022 by four Chinese-language outlets (three Chinese media houses and one Chinese-language newspaper based in Bangkok), read through framing theory and social identity theory. Three coders classified the posts and inter-coder reliability was tested. Posts with fewer than ten engagements were excluded.
What it found
- The tone of the coverage was predominantly neutral — the three coders classified 94.5%, 85.2% and 82.8% of posts respectively as neutral statements, against only 0.8–2.3% offering positive encouragement.
- The dominant angle was explaining the policy itself, at 55.5% (71 posts), followed by negative news about legalisation at 36.7% (47 posts), with positive news at just 4.7% (6 posts) and medical benefits at 10.9% (14). Volume peaked in the month the policy took effect.
- Reader comments ran in the opposite direction to the coverage. The researchers found a cluster of comments rejecting Thailand as a destination, reasoning that they might unknowingly eat food containing cannabis, that oversight after legalisation could not be trusted, and that the policy was imitation of the West.
- A third of the posts cited no source at all — 58.6% (75 posts) drew on Thai media reports, 7.8% (10) were compiled by the outlets themselves, and 33.6% (43) gave no source.
- The most strongly discouraging posts were not editorial opinion but forwarded notices from the Chinese embassy prohibiting citizens from bringing cannabis products home.
Why it matters
For nation-image work the lesson is that counting how much coverage is neutral tells you nothing about how it lands. The comment thread is where meaning is settled, and coverage that stays neutral while leaving the reader's actual worry unanswered — could I eat it by accident at a street stall, what happens when I fly home — leaves a space that fear fills instead. Tourism communication has to answer questions at the level of a traveller's day, not only announce the policy completely.
Limits to know before citing this
Censorship left the dataset incomplete, and the authors say so: the study had to be confined to Weibo because the relevant terms cannot be searched on China's main search engine, and because outlets evade the restricted word using homophones or emoji, so the search cannot have caught everything. Weibo's real-name system encourages self-censorship, so visible comments may not be genuine opinion. The study does not measure whether those comments translated into fewer trips — the authors place that outside its scope. This summary does not name the four outlets, because the finding about missing source attribution attaches to individual outlets and the usable lesson does not depend on which one.
Cite this work
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Deng, S., Slutskiy, P., & Boonchutima, S. (2023). The Chinese media narrative of Thailand as a tourist destination after the legalisation of cannabis. Heliyon, 9(4), Article e15478. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e15478
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