Dr Ong and the Tourism Lab ('tourlab')

Professor Chin Ee Ong is an internationally recognised scholar in cultural heritage management and tourism, known for his leadership in research, teaching, and policy engagement across Asia-Pacific and beyond. He has led evaluative missions for international organisations in the domain of culture, is a member of the China National Cultural Geography Committee, and has played key roles in 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 serves on several leading journal editorial boards. His research explores how heritage and tourism are shaped by power, identity, memory, materiality, and visitor experience, with work spanning Macau, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe. He has published widely in top journals, contributed UNESCO and UNESCAP training manuals, and is co-author of the Fourth Edition of Routledge volume Cultural Tourism (2026).

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Prof Chin Ee Ong’s research is situated at the intersection of cultural heritage management, cultural geography, and critical tourism studies. Across his publications, he investigates how heritage and tourism spaces are produced, governed, experienced, and contested in rapidly changing social and urban contexts, especially in Macau, China, Southeast Asia, and selected European settings. A defining feature of his scholarship is the view that heritage is not a fixed inheritance, but a dynamic and negotiated process shaped by state power, market logics, entrepreneurial practice, material objects, affect, memory, and visitor engagement.

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A major strand of Prof Ong’s work focuses on cultural tourism and heritage-making. His research explores topics such as nostalgic cultural consumption, themed and curated spaces, film and heritage, postcolonial identity, difficult heritage, and World Heritage interpretation. Through studies of cinemas, theme parks, historic towns, museums, warfare sites, refugee transit camps, and historic hotels, he shows how tourism mediates relationships between culture, nature, history, identity, and consumption. His publications also demonstrate sustained interest in the politics of remembering and forgetting, the micropolitics of adaptation and reuse in heritage settings, and the ways in which tourism stages and reshapes ideas of “Chinese-ness,” diaspora, and national identity.

In cultural geography and tourism studies, Prof Ong makes important contributions to debates on tourism urbanisation, mobility, biopolitics, class, governance, policy mobilities, and Chinese tourism. His work addresses issues ranging from Chinese backpacking and outbound tourism to light festivals, destination image, and state-led tourism development, while more recent studies engage with assemblage thinking, relational materialism, and more-than-human tourism through analyses of pandas, marine animals, aquariums, and themed environments. His research has been published in prominent journals such as, Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Tourism Geographies, Tourist Studies, Asia-Pacific Viewpoint, and Antipode. Beyond academic publishing, his authorship of UNESCO and UNESCAP training manuals reflects a strong applied and professional dimension, particularly in heritage interpretation, guide training, and cultural tourism site management.

 

Overall, Prof Ong’s scholarship offers a distinctive and influential understanding of tourism and heritage as fields where power, identity, memory, materiality, and consumption are continuously negotiated. His forthcoming book, Cultural Tourism, and new work on adaptive reuse, nostalgic consumption, and film-heritage synergies further extend this research agenda.