Zhao and his wife flew to Auckland on January 11, then onto Christchurch.
From there they drove a rental car to Tekapo and Wanaka, staying overnight at each destination.
On the day of the crash, Zhao drove to Arrowtown over the Crown Range, where they stopped for an hour.
They planned to travel to Queenstown that afternoon.
After driving south on McDonnell Rd, Zhao indicated a right turn at the intersection of SH6 and Arrow Junction.
Meanwhile a car on SH6 was waiting to turn right into McDonnell Rd and a salvage truck was approaching on the highway from the opposite direction.
Zhao pulled out into the path of the truck, which hit the right of the Nissan hire-car he was in, spinning it around and into a road sign.
The truck then ploughed into the third car waiting to turn.
All three vehicles were extensively damaged, Sergeant Chris George said.
The court heard Liu was directing her husband using the car's GPS system.
Judge Phillips said he knew of the intersection where the crash happened.
"There are a number of inherent difficulties with it. It requires a driver to be careful and to keep a close watch to his or her right because traffic is coming over a brow of a hill and on your left there is traffic coming off a road bridge," he said.
"It would appear to me that you were more intent on this modern phenomenon of following GPS trails rather than paying attention to the roads you were travelling on."
Defence counsel Jo Turner said her client and his wife had had to delay their departure from New Zealand and now planned to return home on February 24.
They had been surviving on money sent from China, she said.
However, the rental car Zhao was driving was fully insured up to $1 million.
Judge Phillips said the driving was "patently careless" and he disregarded the fact the defendant was a tourist for the purpose of sentencing.
He ordered Zhao to pay the drivers of the other vehicles $750 each and banned him from driving for nine months.
The defendant must come up with the cash by Friday, the judge said.
