China's Exploding Tourism Economy: Three Examples

Few things demonstrate the rapid rate of modernization and postmodern tourism consumption in China as does the rise in tourism activity and the country's tourism economy. I just returned from a couple of weeks in China attending a conference, a field trip and giving some guest lectures at a university.  

The trip took me to Zhangjiajie National Park in Hunan Province for a tourism conference, and post-conference field trip by tourist bus to the old city of Feng Huang (Phoenix) in Hunan Province, and to the city of Weihai in Shandong Province where I visited Shandong University.  Here are few comments on what I learned from each of these places.

The cable car at Zhangjiajie National Park, Hunan Province, China

(1) Zhangjiajie - This tourism conference is held every two years in different locations in China.  This was the seventh meeting, and the sixth one in a row that I have attended.  It was also the largest event yet, with almost 300 mainland Chinese participants.  We only had about 20 international participants, do I think to the poor global economy and the lack of Zhangjiajie's lack of international renown (though it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site).

More than ever before, I was amazed and pleased at the quality of research papers that Chinese students presented, as well as their increased English speaking capabilities.  I remember the first conference that I attended in Guilin in 2000, and the few painful efforts that a few Chinese scholars made to present in English.  By contrast, this year about half of the paper sessions were in English and half were in Chinese, giving international participants a wider range of sessions to attend than ever in the past.

Lesson: The quality of academic scholarship in China is growing rapidly, and the newest crop of students and lecturers will soon be making a significant mark internationally.

Tourists line up for the boat ride at Feng Huang old city in Hunan Province, China

(2) Feng Huang - On Google+ I commented that Feng Huang was a Chinese version of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. This is both in terms of the atmosphere (old buildings renovated and filled with tourist-oriented shops and foods), and the masses of tourists that are found there during the peak summer season.  I had never heard of Feng Huang (Phoenix) before this conference, and the photos that I could find of it when I put the conference website together showed old buildings and almost no people! (see http://www.geog.nau.edu/igust/China2011/)

First, it took us 7 hours, instead of four, by bus to get there due to the massive traffic jam as we approached the city.  The crowds in the old city (which is along a river and surrounded by a new city) were like Disneyland on a crowded summer weekend!  I had seen this in several popular tourist destinations in China in the past, including at Zhangjiajie National Park during a one-day conference field trip.  It seems that all of the top tourist attractions in China these days are overrun with tourists during the summer season. Most are on group tours, and, interestingly, many Chinese tourists also complain about the over crowded conditions.

Lesson: "Carrying capacity" has always had a very different meaning in China compared to other parts of the world.  As the world becomes ever more populated (approaching 7 billion), issues of capacity, visitor experience, and economic motivations will increase, and China's rapidly growing middle class may be at the cutting edge of this.

More photos of Fenghuang can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/alanalew/FenghuangChina

The "international beach" (popular with Russians) at Weihai, Shandong Province, China.

(3) Weihai - I have never seen a Chinese city like this one. It has a population of about 150,000 people (very small by Chinese standards) spread out along a series of long, sandy swimming beaches.  Traffic jams are almost non-existent, and the pace of life is much slower than in I am used to seeing in China. About a third of the people at breakfast at my Shandong University hotel were Russian families who come here from Siberia to enjoy the beach.

Speaking of China's growing wealth, however, I have never seen more constructions taking place in one location in my entire life of travel -- and that is saying a lot!  Almost all of the construction (90% perhaps) is for vacation homes and timeshares.  People from all over China, as well as from nearby South Korea, are wanting to buy a piece of life on the beach in Weihai. I really wonder what is going to happen over the coming few years as thousands of new vacation units (mostly apartments, but also some villas) come onto the market.  It seems like there will be a glut of units, which could push down prices and put a crunch on maintenance and upkeep.  One other issue is that the weather in Weihai, while great in the summer, is very windy in all of the other seasons, and very cold in winter!

Lesson 3: Never underestimate the ability of the real estate industry to sell paradise to tourists.  Weihai is the ultimate experiment in this, though I have heard that a similar real estate market is also found on Hainan Island in southern China.

More photos of Weihai can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/alanalew/WeihaiChina

As usual, China never ceases to amaze -- especially from a tourism perspective!

I Hate Being Liminal - on the transition to home from a trip abroad

[Photo: View of the Li River from my conference hotel in Yangshuo, China]

I think I just experienced one of the longest travel-related liminal experiences ever (at least for me).

Liminal experiences are those that are characterized by transitions from one state of being to another. Tourists experience liminality when they transition from a home-based state of being to a travel-based state. Liminality also occurs during rights of passage, such as graduating from school, becoming married, becoming a parent, or becoming a new employee of a company. The liminal experience is one of becoming something different, and is potentially transformative, with a shedding of the old and a creation of something new, but also a period of vulnerability and weakness in the face of an uncertain future.

The transformative potential of travel is one of the major reasons that many people want to travel. Even when a trip is fully planned and fully chartered and catered, there is still the possibility, if not probability, of meeting new people, seeing the unexpected, and doing something that is totally unconnected to one's home. The period of liminality, the transition between being a resident-in-place and being a tourist-on-the-road, normally occurs when the tourist is in transit between their home and their destination. For most people it is a period of expectation, anticipation and hope – the emotions are generally positive, though there could be some strain related to the exertion of travel.

However, there is a second liminal experience that is a bit different. This experience occurs at the end of the trip, when the tourist is returning home and transitioning from being a traveling-guest to a resident-host. In this case, the emotions may be either positive or negative. Negative emotions may be related to reverse culture shock, which arises when a tourist "goes native" in an exotic destination and must readjust to "going native" in their home place. Going native during a trip actually refers to developing a sense of attachment to a place. This attachment may be to the physical place, a culture in that place, or an individual(s) that was met during the trip. In each of these instances, the return home is accompanied by a sense of separation and loss. That loss may be addressed by an attempt to develop or maintain a longer-term relationship with the travel destination through repeated visits or other commitments and activities.

For example, I experienced a deeply moving trip to the Shan State of Myanmar in 2005. I blogged about that trip – basically keeping an online trip diary (http://golden-triangle.blogspot.com). After the trip, I continued for a year to post and discuss news items about Myanmar. Eventually, however, my attachment to the people and culture of Myanmar waned and I stopped blogging about the country, though I still hold it in a special place in my memory. Tourists also develop an attachment to each other, mostly when traveling as a group of some kind. The sociologist Ning Wang has referred to this social bonding as "touristic communitas," and it too can result in a sense of loss when the trip comes to an end. Close friendships can form that continue via long distance, and which may remain strong, though they are more likely to fade with time.

In both of the post-trip instances cited above, intentional efforts can be made to continue attachments to place and attachments to people beyond the trip. This effort is part of the remaking of self that is one of the goals of travel and tourism. (I believe this is the major reason why people travel.) The effort varies considerably from one person to the next. For some, the attachment is a mild one where the destination simply occupies a check mark on the list of places that have been visited – a kind of trophy or bragging right. For others it is more meaningful, either in terms of personal relationships or professional relationships. The permanence of these relationships will also vary considerably, though maintaining strong ties over a distance can challenge any relationship. We might think of the liminality of the return trip as never really ending so long as an intentional effort to maintain a place, culture or person relationship continues.

That being said, there is another way that the liminal experience of a return trip can seemingly last forever. That is when the tourist is ready to return home before the trip has ended. And that is what I just experienced. I just got back from a trip to China to attend a tourism conference in Yangshuo (near Guilin). Prior to the conference, I traveled with a colleague in the Business School at Northern Arizona University who had a conference to attend in Chengdu (Sichuan Province). So I spent about five days touring the Chengdu area prior to the tourism conference, which lasted for an additional four nights. I also spent layover nights in Shanghai on my way to Chengdu and again on my way home from Guilin. Altogether, I was gone for 15 days. However, after touring Chengdu and then attending my tourism conference, with a very full day of outdoor activities in Yangshuo (which was very, very hot and humid), I was pretty burned out and was ready to go home.

However, I did want to see the larger city of Guilin (where the airport is located). I had been to Guilin four times (first time in 1988) in the past and wanted to see how it might have changed since my last visit in 2001. Also, my colleague had never been to Guilin and also wanted to see the city. Finally, he also arranged for us to get free accommodations in exchange for guest lectures at Guangxi Normal University. But just like in nearby Yangshuo, Guilin was very, very hot and humid, and the hotel we stayed in was the lowest quality of the entire journey (no internet, cockroaches, and in need of new carpets -- though it was free!). On top of this, I was coming off of an emotional high from the great meeting we had in Yangshuo, and feeling the loss of separation (as described above) that often accompanies the end of these meetings (which I help to organize every two years in China). So, as much as I wanted to see Guilin, I really wanted to just go home. I was done with my trip in Yangshuo and I had entered a liminal state of mind, which made me feel somewhat weak and emotionally vulnerable (not feelings that I get very often).

The Shanghai Airport Hotel (aka the 168 Hotel) was a very pleasant surprise, with weak but workable internet access, at Y398/night (about US$58/night),. This gave me a good rest for my cross-Pacific flight the next day. I dislike LAX (really bad internet options), but was lucky to be able to change a seven hour layover there into a one hour layover, getting me home sooner than expected. So I have almost completed my liminal transition, I almost over my liminal anxieties, I am reconnecting with conference colleagues to build on the new relationships made there, and I am glad I went to Guilin, despite all the challenges. Now, we'll see how long it takes to get over the jet lag, which is always worse for me when upon returning to Arizona from Asia...

[Photo: sign inside my hotel room at the old Chinese hotel I stayed at in Guilin, China.]

"Emo" Tourism

The panel session announcement below was in my inbox today.... While Dark Tourism is a concept that I have known about for several years, the idea that there is an annual academic conference on "Evil and Human Wickedness" kind of threw me for a loop.

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PANEL ON REALITY TOURS - Call for papers:

To be organized as part of the 8th Global Conference Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness. Monday 19th March - Friday 23rd March 2007, Salzburg, Austria

Ground Zero, Katrina Tours, Chernobyl Tours, Favela Tours – tragedy and poverty attract more and more tourists, especially those seeking “ethical” or “authentic” experiences. The aim of this panel is to gather scholars from different disciplines who have as their main object of investigation these so-called reality tours. We are particularly interested on discussing how human misery, understood on its broader sense, is commercialized on various kinds of tourist experiences, therefore relating reflections on these phenomena to issues of Western contemporary moralities.
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I personally find Dark Tourism an interesting topic, which is why I subscribe to the Dark Tourism research email list, on which this announcement was posted. At the same time, I have not liked going scary movies since high school and I generally avoid the dark tourism's most morbid attractions -- which I find too depressing. There is, I think, a range of degrees of darkness. It is an edge phenomenon -- some people like to go close to the edge for the thrill, and a few people go over the edge into the depths of "evil and human wickedness."

This conference is put on by the American Political Science Association, not by tourism academics. Topics that are liste on the conference website include:

• the concept and language of 'evil' and 'wickedness'
• the nature and sources of evil and human wickedness
• moral intuitions about dreadful crimes
• psychopathic behaviour - mad or bad?
• choice, responsibility, and diminished responsibility
• social and cultural reactions to evil and human wickedness
• the portrayal of evil and human wickedness in the media and popular culture
• suffering in literature and film
• individual acts of evil, group violence, holocaust and genocide; obligations of bystanders
• terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing; the evils of terrorism, fear of terrorism, international relations especially with regard to the modern nation state, superpower interventionist strategies, post-war reorganisation following the evils of war
• the search for meaning and sense in evil and human wickedness
• the nature and tasks of theodicy
• religious understandings of evil and human wickedness
• postmodern approaches to evil and human wickedness
• ecocriticism, evil and suffering
• gender and evil
• evil and the use/abuse of technology; evil in cyberspace

Sounds more like sociology and psychology than political science -- but I guess that is the nature of contemporary social sciences. Like the concept of Dark Tourism, I wonder what kind of people are attacted to a conference like this? Goths? Emos? Nazis? Closet goths, emos or nazis? Old/Retired goths, emos, and nazis? I don't mean to insult anyone, but this is the edge again, that we are talking about. Since I was part-jock, part-hippy in high school, I would guess that they are probably not like me. But then who can tell with a closet emo?