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

1. What's in a Site?: The Making of "Scenic Spots"

1 WHAT'S IN A SITE? The Making of"Scenic Spots" he cover of the March 1982 issue of Tourist (Liiyou), one of China's newly launched travel magazines, shows the tourist as Westerner. Unlike the Soviet Union, where a form ofwhatwe might call wilderness tourism was valorized as contributing to the physical and moral fitness ofthe Soviet person, Maoist China saw tourism as an element ofbourgeois lifestyle and therefore, in principle, taboo (Zhang Guangrui 2003:15). Tourism was also effectively absent from people's everyday lives and vocabularies . A peculiar exception to this was the "pilgrimages" of Red Guards to revolutionary sites during the Cultural Revolution. These sites, classified in a state-approved listwith a hierarchyofthree levels, constituted a canonized set that Rudolf Wagner (1992:380-86) called "the religious geography of new China." In the decades since 1978-officially known as the era of "reform and opening"-rising incomes and the appearance of a consumer class with a state-sanctioned concept ofa holiday have made possible the emergence of a Chinese tourism, slow at first butvery rapid in the last decade. This development has been closely tied to state policies. AfterMao's death, the ideological stigma oftourism began to fade as the Chinese government opened the country to incoming tourism as a way to earn foreign currency. But the view oftourism as first and foremost a modern Western practice (fig. I) persisted into the early 1990s. Thus an article 3 FIG. 1. The Westerner as the tourist, 1982. Cover ofTourist (Beijing), March 1982. Berlin State Ubrary-Prussian Cultural Fund. entitled "China's Tourism Business in '90: Looking Back and Looking Ahead," published in the then five-year-old professional journal Tourism Tribune (Luyou xuekan), talks exclusivelyabout incoming tourism (National Tourism Administration 1991). Most of the incoming tourists were ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia rather than "real 4 WHAT'S IN A SITE? Westerners" (ZhangGuangrui 2003:16). (The primarytargetoftourism development was reflected in the fact that the state-owned China Travel Service was subordinated to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau.) This period witnessed the proliferation of Chinese translations ofEnglish-language literature on tourism management,I as officials and managers in charge of tourism argued for a "scientific" approach to developing China's "tourism product" (e.g., Li Hairui 1991; Zhang Yongxian 1991; Xiao Tihui 1991). Although they increasingly acknowledged the appearance of domestic tourists (e.g., Hng 1991), they still ignored them in these discussions or relegated them to a secondaryposition, as did the official ofthe Anhui Province Tourism Bureauwho proposed thatinternational tourists should be "the main consumerbase" of"national- and provincial-level key touristproducts," while domestic tourists "lead" the development of ordinary products "below provincial level" (Zhang Yongxian 1991:30). The Emergence ofChinese Tourism The development of domestic tourism is variously reported to have first appeared on the central government's agenda in a speech by SecretaryGeneral Hu Yaobang in 1985 (Wei et al. 1999:145) or by Prime Minister Li Pengin 1991. In anycase, although the National TourismAdministration created a domestic travel department in 1985, the first high-level document on domestic tourism developmentwas a plan approved by the State Council in 1993 (ibid.). By the late 1990S, thanks to a combination ofgrowing incomes and a series ofnew policies, it became a mass phenomenon. After the introduction of the five-day workweek in 1995, the National Tourism Administration declared 1996 the Year of Leisure and Vacation (Honggen Xiao 2003:273) as partofthe government's "leisure culture campaign" (JingWang 2001:39), and, in 1997, it made developing domestic tourism a priority in its policy for the first time (Qian 2003:148). Finally, in 1998, when general domestic consumption slackened and threatened economic growth, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decided to promote tourism as a remedy (Wei et al. 1999:4). To facilitate it, the government in 1999 raised the number of holidays from eight to ten days, creating three weeks off: one each around the I October and I May state holidays and the traditional lunar Spring Festival. Additionally, private companies often provide their employees with another week ofcollective holidays, which, ifthe company is notvery large, they will frequently spend traveling together. WHAT'S IN A SITE? 5 The introduction ofthe three week-long holidays resulted in a revolution in Chinese leisure that was underscored by a series of meetings on domestic tourism organized bythe national and provincialTourismAdministrations, at...