Chin-Ee Ong, Professor
Professor Chin Ee Ong is an internationally recognised scholar in cultural heritage management and tourism, known for leadership in research, teaching, and policy engagement across Asia-Pacific. He has led evaluative missions for international organisations, serves on the China National Cultural Geography Committee, and has contributed to UNESCO heritage training, ATLAS, and Critical Tourism Studies Asia-Pacific. Prof Ong is Editor-in-Chief of Tourist Studies, Editor Emeritus of Hospitality and Society, and sits on several leading editorial boards. He is co-author of the Fourth Edition of Routledge volume Cultural Tourism (2026).
Prof Ong's research sits at the intersection of cultural heritage management, cultural geography, and critical tourism studies, examining how heritage and tourism spaces are produced, governed, experienced, and contested—particularly in Macau, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe. A defining feature of his scholarship is the view that heritage is a dynamic, negotiated process shaped by state power, market logics, memory, materiality, and visitor engagement.
His work spans nostalgic cultural consumption, themed spaces, film and heritage, postcolonial identity, difficult heritage, and World Heritage interpretation, revealing how tourism mediates relationships between culture, history, identity, and consumption. He also contributes to debates on tourism urbanisation, mobility, biopolitics, governance, and Chinese tourism, with more recent studies engaging assemblage thinking and more-than-human tourism through analyses of pandas, marine animals, and themed environments.
His research appears in cutting-edge journals including Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Tourism Geographies, Tourist Studies, Asia-Pacific Viewpoint, and Antipode. Authorship of UNESCO and UNESCAP training manuals further reflects a strong applied dimension in heritage interpretation and cultural tourism management.
The first strand of my latest research is centred on the development of large scale urban and heritage tourism projects in China's Greater Bay Area.
I am also interested in extending my work on tourism in heritage places into issues concerning resident aspirations, entrepreneurship and livelihoods in China's historic towns.