The Chinese Embassy in Manila denied on Tuesday night the supposed blacklisting of the Philippines for Chinese tourists.
In a statement, the Chinese embassy said reports on Senate President Migz Zubiri’s pronouncement that the country is already “part of a blacklist of tourist sites,” as per Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian, “is misinformation.”
“China has not placed the Philippines on its blacklist for tourism,” it added.
Several hours prior to this, the embassy already released a vaguely worded statement on the supposed blacklisting by only saying that tourism is an important area of cooperation for both countries.
“To further elucidate on the 'tourist blacklist' remarks, tourism is an important component of practical cooperation between China and the Philippines, which has helped further deepen long-time friendship between the two peoples,” the embassy said.
"Before the Covid-19 pandemic close to two million Chinese nationals traveled to the Philippines in 2019, making China the second largest source of tourists," it added.
On Tuesday morning, Zubiri said Huang told him and his fellow senators during the latter’s courtesy call that the Philippines is now blacklisted “because they do not know if the tourists going there will be joining POGO (Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators) operations.”
He also said China purportedly made the move as it does “not know if their nationals who go to the Philippines will be safe from illegal activities done by the Triad, by the syndicates operating POGOs.”
“The Chinese government is against any forms of gambling including POGO or online gambling. On the issue of regulating online gambling, Ambassador Huang said that it is hard to regulate online transactions based on their experience, thus they just totally ban online gambling as well,” Zubiri added.