‘Not a bad thing’: Chinese students offered paid tours of Singapore universities for extra cash

Chinese postgraduate students were selling tours of the National University of Singapore (NUS) to tourists, amid unhappiness from local students over an influx of mainland visitors.

A listing of the two-hour tour, which has since been removed, was found on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu for 273 yuan (US$38). Thirty-one people had purchased the tour, which covered the Central Library, University Town and the NUS Museum, and left mostly positive reviews on Xiaohongshu.

One of the tour guides, a mechanical engineering masters student who declined to be named, told This Week in Asia on Tuesday that she and three other students started offering the tours four months ago to make extra money.

The average cost per person for such tours was 130 yuan, with prices dependent on what customers wanted to see, she said.

The 24-year-old claimed she removed the listing on Wednesday as the campus was getting too crowded with tourists.

She said she used to provide tours for a tour company, but while the company charged 350 yuan per person, she would only get 50 to 80 yuan.

She acknowledged that her tours occupied a “grey region”.

“Big business behaviour may not be allowed, but for us it’s just two to four persons each time,” said the postgraduate student, who noted that all of the tour groups they had taken had been tourists from China.

“Without us, the parents and their children may also rush [around] the school everywhere, so I think [our tours are] not a bad thing,” she added.

The postgraduate student noted that one of the group’s biggest selling points was that she and the other postgraduate students, which included doctoral students, could tell parents and their children about the application process and how they got into NUS.

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