Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority

Notes

NOTES 1 What's in a Site? 1. See, for example, a list of new publications by Liiyou Jiaoyu Chubanshe (Tourism Education Press) in Tourism Tribune 6, no. 1 (1991):73. 2. On the role of consumption in spiritual civilization campaigns, see Lewis (2002). 3. Mayakinfo.ru, http://www.mayakinfo.ru/news.asp?msg=10769 (accessed October 15,2002). 4. The National Tourism Authority also publishes what it labels the number of domestic tourist trips. This figure was 240 million in 1985,719 million in 1999, and 784 million in 2001 (Meszaros 2003). These very high figures-currently suggesting two trips for everythree PRC citizens-are based on surveys ofrail and road traffic (Ghimire and Li 2001:92). Therefore, although they are used by most tourism research publications, they reflectmobilityin general rather than tourism specifically. 5. Iam grateful to RudolfWagner and CatherineYeh for acquainting mewith this literature and allowing me to read a copy ofYeh's 2006 publication in manuscript. 6. On the canon ofChinese culture as represented in 1980s-1990s school textbooks , see Spakowski (1997). 7. Anagnost (1997:168) reported how, indeed, visitors to the partly newly built, partly rebuilt"old town" around the Confucian ternpIe in Nanjing were having their photos taken ata spoton the QinhuaiRiver known from the seventeenth-centuryplay The Peach Blossom Fan. NOTES TO PAG ES 5-12 109 8. The quatrain is accessible atthe PRC ForeignMinistry's Web site, http://www .fmprc.gov.cn/chn/wjb/zzjg/ldmzs/gjlb/2033/2035/1:7942.htrn (accessed February 9, 2004). Substituting Cuba for the White Emperor's Citadel and South America for Jiangling, a place in Hubei, Jiang's quatrain reads: Early leave from China amid coloured clouds: Ten thousand miles to South America we make in ten days. As off the shore, the storm roars madly, Green pines stand proud like mountains. ~ jfi¥~JFj ~ fiiJ /7"Jllt~ -tE1:1fo 111;¥)Xl,'q'I'»rn .:f'~1lt11' ;t~[J W0 Li Bo's original poem If-it S%,;!Ji(. reads: Early leave from the White Emperor's Citadel among coloured clouds: A thousand miles to Jiangling we make in one day. While on the shores the gibbons cry ceaselessly The lithe boat has passed ten thousand mountain folds. ~jfs%,Jlij~fiiJ f- Jl1I~- E1:1fo M;¥~jf~:f1i ~:A- E,:l±/7":I: W0 The second line ofthe poem is itselfa reference to an earlierwork, the earlysixthcentury Comments to the Scripture on Waters (Shuijing zhu) by Li Daoyuan, which says "it is possible to set out from the White Emperor's Citadel in the morning and arrive in Chiang-ling [Jiangling] byevening" (translationin Strassberg1994:88).Thus, Jiang endowed Cuba with cultural landscape references reaching back 1,500 years. I am grateful to Xiao Putao for pointing outJiang's quatrain. 9. Interview by Joana Breidenbach, Shanghai, 5 September 2003. 10. Writingabout Chinese art music in the 1950S and '60S, BarbaraMittler (1996, accessed 18 February2004) describes the dominantstyleas '''pentatonic romanticism,' a homophonic, virtuoso style derived from the compositionaltechniques ofnineteenthcentury Western music writing." She goes on to say that this "invented tradition," 110 NOTES TO PAG ES 13-20 which in the PRC was declared the official style of "Chinese music," "invents the death ofits own folk tradition" ofpitches and phraseologythatdo not fit the Western scale. Elsewhere, she notes that this tendency has led to the "reform" oftraditional instruments, and when Chinese ensembles first began appearing in the Westin 1979, listeners complained thatthe music theyplayedwas "notChinese" (Mittler1997:27475 , n. 27, 29). Thus Chinese composerswere caught between divergent domestic and foreign expectations to produce "Chinese music." I thank RudolfWagner for introducing me to Mittler's work. Foran analysis ofnational imagery, pentatonic phrases, and disco in a Chinese pop video clip, see Lee (2003:65-77). II. All quotes are my translations of the Chinese text unless noted otherwise. 2 Two Sites and a Non-Site I. On the cultural politics ofthe "Tibet craze" in China, see Upton (2002). 2. No or very low state funding is also typical of urban conservation, and tourism revenue is expected to butrarelydoes go into conservation efforts. Since gated "old towns" are often run by corporations, money earned from tickets does not necessarilyflow into conservation. Lijiang has tried, butbecause ofresistance from businesses ' was unable to introduce a tourist tax prior to 2001 (Lijiang 2001). 3. Statistics from UNESCO'sMan and Biosphere Reserves Web site, http://www .unesco.org/mab/sustainable/3tourism.htm (accessed...