Once a remote place of exile at the bottom of China, Hainan reinvented itself as a tropical playground, surfing destination, duty-free shopping hub and laboratory for a new kind of Chinese tourism. Along the way, it borrowed liberally from Hawaii’s imagery. Today, however, Hainan is trying to prove that it no longer needs the comparison.
There is a moment on Hainan when the China most foreign visitors imagine seems very far away.
It might come early in the morning at Riyue Bay, on the island’s southeast coast, when surfers paddle through warm water beneath a line of coconut palms. Or farther south in Sanya, where resort towers face the South China Sea and winter visitors trade northern China’s padded coats for shorts and sandals.
Then there is Wanning, where surfing has become part sport, part youth culture and part tourism experiment. At the CTG Wave-Chaser Resort, the waves do not even require an ocean. An artificial surfing pool is designed to produce 23 types of waves, allowing novices and experienced surfers to practice regardless of what the sea is doing.
Nearby, the real ocean supplies what technology cannot. Riyue Bay has become Hainan’s best-known surfing address, helped by warm water, a long surfing season and a growing culture of surf schools, cafés, bars and small businesses clustered around the beach.
This is the new image of Hainan: young, tropical, active and increasingly outward-looking. But Hainan did not arrive here naturally. It was constructed — economically, politically and, to a remarkable degree, imaginatively.
And one of the models it looked toward was thousands of kilometers across the Pacific.
Before Paradise, There Was Exile
Long before Hainan was marketed as a tropical escape, its remoteness was precisely what defined it.
Separated from Guangdong by the Qiongzhou Strait, the island sat at the far southern edge of the Chinese world. Indigenous Li communities had inhabited Hainan for centuries before large-scale Han Chinese settlement transformed its coastal regions. For imperial governments, distance made the island useful for another purpose: exile.
Officials who had fallen out of favor could be dispatched south, far from the political center. The tropical landscape that tourists are now invited to regard as paradise was, from the perspective of officials in ancient northern China, punishment. That historical inversion is one of the most intriguing things about modern Hainan.
Isolation became exclusivity. Heat became tropical warmth. Coconut palms became branding. Distance became escape.
The island also carries a much darker modern history. Japan occupied Hainan beginning in 1939, exploiting its strategic position and resources during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The island subsequently experienced the upheavals that transformed the rest of China after 1949, while remaining administratively attached to Guangdong for decades.
The decisive break came in 1988.
That year Hainan became a province in its own right — and the entire island was designated a Special Economic Zone. It was an extraordinary gamble.
China had already begun experimenting with market-oriented reforms in places such as Shenzhen. Hainan offered something different: an entire tropical island on which development, investment and tourism could be accelerated. The old periphery suddenly had a new purpose.
Hainan was to become a frontier.
“Hawaii Is Too Far”
Tourism planners faced an obvious problem. How do you explain Hainan to hundreds of millions of potential travelers who have never considered a tropical beach holiday inside China?
The answer was elegantly simple: Compare it with somewhere they already knew. Hawaii.
The comparison became so persistent that “China’s Hawaii” and “the Hawaii of the East” followed Hainan through decades of tourism coverage. More revealing is Hainan’s own early marketing.
A 2025 retrospective published by Xinhua on more than 30 years of Hainan tourism promotion records one of the island’s early slogans as:
“Hawaii is too far; come to China’s Hainan Island!”It is difficult to imagine a clearer piece of destination positioning.
Hainan was not merely describing itself as tropical. It was effectively telling Chinese travelers that the dream represented by Hawaii — palms, beaches, sunshine and island escape — could be found closer to home.
And this is where the story of alohabecomes more complicated.
“Aloha” is not simply an advertising catchphrase. It is a Hawaiian word with meanings extending beyond hello and goodbye, and Hawaii’s own tourism authorities continue to place aloha, mālama, ho‘okipa and kuleana within a specifically Hawaiian cultural framework.
Hainan has certainly traded on Hawaiian imagery and the Hawaii comparison, and contemporary travel writing still casually uses constructions such as “Hainan Aloha.” But an extensive search did notturn up convincing documentation that “Aloha” itself was formally adopted or “taken” as an official Hainan tourism slogan.
The documented borrowing is arguably more interesting anyway. Hainan borrowed the idea of Hawaii. And while this was happening, Hawaii itself was hardly ignoring China.
As Chinese outbound travel expanded, Hawaii actively pursued Chinese visitors. The Hawaii Tourism Authority has treated China as one of its international source markets and today continues Chinese-language digital marketing through platforms including WeChat, RED, Douyin and Weibo.
That created an unusual tourism rivalry: Hawaii was trying to persuade Chinese travelers to fly across the Pacific while Hainan was effectively saying they could find their tropical island holiday without leaving China.
The silence was therefore less a documented case of Hawaii accepting the appropriation of “Aloha” than a collision of commercial realities. China represented a valuable outbound tourism market, while Hainan was simultaneously learning how to compete for those same travelers at home.
Building the Tropical Dream of Hainan
The transformation was not immediate. In Hainan’s early tourism years, infrastructure and service standards could be inconsistent. The island had beaches and climate, but possessing tropical scenery and operating a sophisticated resort economy are very different things.
Investment gradually changed the equation. Sanya became the showcase.
Hotel groups moved in. Yalong Bay developed into a resort strip. Roads and airports improved. New bays were opened to development. Golf, spas, convention tourism, yacht marinas and enormous resort complexes followed. The marketing evolved with the physical island.
According to the Xinhua retrospective, Hainan passed 10 million tourist visits in 2000. In 2001 its positioning shifted toward the idea of a “tropical island, holiday paradise.” By 2008, as China pushed the concept of an International Tourism Island, the message became “Sunny Hainan, Holiday Paradise.”
Then came another transformation. Hainan discovered shopping.
China introduced and progressively expanded offshore duty-free shopping policies on the island. Luxury retail became almost an attraction in its own right, particularly for Chinese consumers who previously might have combined an overseas holiday with luxury purchases in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea or Europe.
The pandemic unexpectedly strengthened that role. When Chinese consumers could no longer travel internationally with ease, Hainan offered beaches, resorts and duty-free shopping without crossing a national border.
The island was no longer simply competing with other Chinese destinations. It was attempting to substitute for an overseas holiday.
From Resort Island to Free Trade Port
Hainan’s reinvention accelerated again in 2018, when Beijing announced plans to develop the island as a pilot free-trade zone and eventually a free-trade port. Tourism became part of a much bigger economic project.
Hainan is now positioned by the central government not merely as a holiday island but as an international tourism and consumption center and a gateway between mainland China and Southeast Asia. That explains why modern Hainan can sometimes feel like several experiments happening simultaneously.
- There is luxury Sanya.
- There is duty-free Hainan.
- There is ecological Hainan, including rainforest and protected areas.
- There is medical and wellness tourism.
- There is yacht tourism.
- There is the 988-kilometre coastal scenic highway.
- And increasingly, there is surf Hainan.
The Surfing Reinvention
Surfing offers Hainan something that another luxury hotel cannot: culture. At Riyue Bay near Wanning, the attraction is not simply accommodation facing a beach. The beach itself is the activity.
Warm water — around 26°C for much of the year — and a long season of surfable conditions helped establish the bay among Chinese surfers. Competitions, surf clubs and training followed.
Then came the lifestyle around the sport. Coffee shops appeared. Surf schools multiplied. Music, fashion, cafés and nightlife began attaching themselves to the surfing scene.
This matters because Hainan’s original resort model could be remarkably self-contained: fly into Sanya, enter a large hotel, sit beside a pool, visit a beach, shop and fly home.
Surfing encourages something less controlled.
People stay around the beach. They learn. They return. They meet other surfers. Businesses grow around a community rather than simply around a resort.
The artificial wave pool at CTG Wave-Chaser Resort represents the other side of modern Hainan’s strategy: if nature provides an attraction, engineer it, package it and make it available more consistently.
The result is a curious combination of organic surf culture and industrial-scale tourism development. Very Chinese, perhaps — but increasingly less Hawaiian.
So Are Foreigners Actually Coming?
This is the crucial test of Hainan’s repeated description of itself as an internationaltourism island. For most of its modern tourism history, Hainan’s enormous visitor economy has been overwhelmingly domestic. That remains true.
In 2024, Hainan recorded 97.2 million tourist visitsand tourism revenue of roughly 204 billion yuan. International arrivals, however, were just over 1.1 million trips. Although that foreign figure represented a striking 115.6 percent year-on-year increase, it also demonstrates the scale of the imbalance: international tourism is growing rapidly, but Chinese travelers still overwhelmingly dominate the island.
The international side is nevertheless becoming harder to dismiss.
By the end of 2025, Hainan’s international arrivals and departures had exceeded 1.46 million, surpassing the previous 2019 record. Visa-free entry accounted for about 90 percent of foreign arrivals, according to immigration authorities.
Hainan has become particularly aggressive about removing one of the biggest obstacles foreigners traditionally associated with traveling to China: the visa.
Through overlapping Hainan-specific and national policies, visitors from 86 countrieshad visa-free access under various arrangements by 2025. And they are not all Chinese-speaking visitors from Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan.
Recent foreign source markets reveal something much more international.
Russia is particularly important, continuing a long-established relationship between Russian holidaymakers and Sanya. Kazakhstan and other Central Asian markets are significant as well. South Koreans are arriving. So are Singaporeans and Malaysians.
During the 2026 Spring Festival period, the principal overseas markets included Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Kazakhstan and Singapore.
During the May Day holiday, Sanya reported particularly strong international growth, with Russia, Kazakhstan, Singapore, Malaysia and Belarus among important markets; some major attractions reported substantial numbers of Russian and South Korean guests.
In other words, yes: foreigners are coming to Hainan in meaningful and rapidly growing numbers.But Hainan is not yet an international tourism destination in the same sense as Phuket, Bali or Hawaii.
One million international arrivals can sound enormous until placed beside nearly 100 million total tourist visits. Hainan remains, first and foremost, China’s tropical playground.
The internationalization is real — but it is still a work in progress.
Beyond Sanya
That may actually work in Hainan’s favor. The island’s most interesting development today is happening as travelers begin looking beyond the traditional Sanya resort belt.
Haikou offers an entirely different urban character. Wanning has surfing.
The central highlands contain tropical forest and communities whose Li and Miao cultures predate the modern tourism economy by centuries.
Xinglong carries another overlooked layer of Hainan’s international history. The area developed with communities of overseas Chinese returning from Southeast Asia, leaving culinary influences that help explain why a cup of locally grown Xinglong coffee can feel as relevant to the Hainan story as a coconut on a beach.
And around Wenchang, rockets occasionally rise above the palms from China’s coastal space-launch facilities — a juxtaposition few tropical destinations can reproduce.
That is the Hainan that becomes interesting once the Hawaii comparison is removed.
The Trouble With Becoming Paradise
Rapid tourism development always carries a price.
Hainan must accommodate extraordinary numbers of domestic visitors during China’s peak holidays. Large-scale resort construction can collide with environmental protection. Duty-free shopping risks turning a destination into a consumption machine. And an island promoted for authenticity can eventually find itself producing the very authenticity tourists expect to see.
There is also the question of culture.
Hawaii itself has spent years confronting the consequences of overtourism, environmental pressure, housing costs and the commercialization of Native Hawaiian culture. “Aloha” is a particularly powerful example of how a concept rooted in language and culture can become an international shorthand for tropical hospitality.
Hainan once benefited from that shorthand.
- Palm trees? Hawaii.
- Surfing? Hawaii.
- Tropical island? Hawaii.
- Luxury beach resorts? Hawaii.
But that comparison now feels increasingly inadequate. Hainan’s story is not Hawaiian.
It is Chinese, Li, Southeast Asian and socialist-market experimental all at once. It includes imperial exile and wartime occupation, coconut plantations and luxury malls, fishing villages and megahotels, rainforest and artificial waves, Communist Party economic planning and international luxury brands.
Few islands contain quite so many contradictions.
No Longer “China’s Hawaii”
The most revealing thing about Hainan today may be how little it needs Hawaii.
Its tourism slogans have steadily moved away from comparison toward constructing an identity of their own. Recent campaigns have emphasized a “Cool Hainan,” using surfing, watersports, aviation and new leisure experiences to reach younger travelers.
That change says something. In 1988, telling a Chinese traveler that Hainan was like Hawaii gave the unknown island instant meaning. Nearly four decades later, Hainan itself has become a brand understood across China. And now comes the harder phase.
Can it become a place the rest of the world recognizes without requiring the words “China’s Hawaii”after its name?
The numbers suggest that process has begun. Visa restrictions have fallen. International arrivals are rising. Russians, Koreans, Southeast Asians and Central Asians are increasingly visible. Surf culture has given parts of the island a younger personality. And Beijing’s enormous Free Trade Port experiment means Hainan’s opening to the outside world is economic as much as touristic.
Yet its biggest strength may ultimately be the thing tourism marketers once tried to disguise by comparing it with somewhere else. Hainan is strange.
Where else can a visitor surf a tropical bay in the morning, drink coffee descended from Southeast Asian immigrant traditions in the afternoon, shop in one of the world’s most ambitious duty-free markets and, on the right day, watch a Chinese rocket climb into the sky?
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