Looking for thrills? Head to China! On social media, the expressions “pay to suffer” and “pay to be scared” are gaining traction, The Guardian reveals. In Hangzhou, in the eastern part of the country, a center offers, for instance, experiences of fake natural disasters, with simulations of typhoons, floods and landslides. Your pick!
Leon Lv, a 28-year-old woman from Chongqing, tells the British newspaper she traveled more than 1,300 kilometers to try the experience. She wanted to know what it feels like to be caught in a typhoon, without facing real danger.
In this 200,000-square-meter center, opened in 2024, visitors confront strong winds and torrents of water that can carry them away only a short distance. During a flood simulation, Leon Lv recalls losing her bearings when several hundred tons of water swept over the participants, but learning to stay calm. “No book and no school can teach me this”, she says. The center’s managers acknowledge that many come above all to get a scare. The majority of their clients are between 20 and 30 years old.
Preparing for the Worst
In Beijing, the “Public Security Museum” also offers simulations of earthquakes, tsunamis and fires in a four-dimensional cinema. In Guangzhou, another center lets visitors feel the tremors of a magnitude 7.2 earthquake. These installations also answer a need for prevention in a country regularly struck by natural disasters, they argue. In 2025, China experienced ten typhoons and recorded a record number of hot days. That year, 67 million people were affected by disasters.
Since then, the authorities have encouraged the development of these immersive experiences to better prepare the population.
Beichuan, Nanjing… In the Footsteps of the Disappeared
But this dark tourism also includes visits to places where real tragedies occurred. Alice, a 30-year-old writer, visited the ruins of Beichuan, a town devastated by the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, which had left more than 70,000 dead. The collapsed buildings have been preserved and opened to the public. “I felt fear at the power of nature and at the number of children and pupils who could not escape”, she recalls.
Historical memory sites also draw an ever-growing audience. In Nanjing, the memorial of the massacre carried out by the Japanese army in 1937 is experiencing rising attendance. According to the country’s official figures, about 300,000 civilians and soldiers were killed during the massacres.
