For the tourism industry, image is everything. Ephemeral, illusive image can boost or sink tourist traffic. Businesses from luggage companies to hotel chains to government tourism agencies spend millions to find an appealing “brand,” one that idealizes the “journey” or the “destination” or the “discovery” without mentioning the crass notion of making money.
A country’s image is not the sole property of a tourism ministry. Countries suffering frequent natural disasters, violent dislocations from political uprisings and revolutions, and rule through a heavy-handed police force are not high on any tourist list. China fits all of those negative categories. Even today, the police can walk into a hotel or restaurant and whisk away a guest without a warrant, simply saying the guest is a suspect.
When Chinese leaders opened their country slowly to tourism, they turned the image question inside out. Tourism would improve China’s poor political image, which in turn would make the country more attractive to tourists, beginning a virtuous loop of image enhancements that would become a money machine.
In the 1980s, when the opening began, China’s image was utterly unfit for a tourist campaign. Thirty years earlier China was so impoverished that American children were told to finish all the food on their plates or they’d end up like the starving children of China who had nothing to eat. The country was also a major “red” enemy, vilified by the United States for its communism. Mao Zedong proved to be the exceptional leader who won China’s civil war, defeating Chiang Kai-shek, America’s aloof ally. Mao then instituted a radical revolution that was largely hidden from the West.
Every war the U.S. fought in Asia after 1950 was against an ally of Communist China, first in Korea and later in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. When the Vietnam War drew massive protests on campuses and city streets, some of the students wore Mao caps to underline their anger at the war. Scholars and journalists, meanwhile, were trying to assess Mao’s rule without direct access to the country, tallying up the benefits of health reforms and the damage done by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in the number of lives lost from starvation and political deaths.
In the popular mind, China had become the land of Red Guards marching by the thousands in Tiananmen Square waving Mao’s Little Red Book. All those decades of revolution competed with the traditional image of China, with its Confucian scholars, blue and white porcelain, scroll paintings, shimmering silk robes and the snaking Great Wall.
In the 1980s, Chinese leaders radically changed direction and jumped into the global economy. The goal was nothing less than to make China one of the world’s new superpowers. The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared that “poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious.” Factories sprang up along the coast and then in the interior. They made automobiles, computers, televisions, furniture, toys and clothing, especially clothing. Whole cities were devoted to the manufacturing of socks or underwear or sweaters. Thanks to very cheap labor and technological breakthroughs, from container ships to the Internet, China could ship around the globe and wipe out competition on every continent. Once a leader of what was known as the Third World of struggling nations, China leapfrogged into the club of wealthy ones—admired in some quarters, feared in others.
Overlooked by most was the role tourism played in China’s grand strategy. From the beginning of the seismic economic reforms, China’s leaders believed that tourism would be critical to its economic development and play a major “diplomatic” role, winning over foreign tourists with China’s preeminence as one of the world’s greatest ancient cultures and wowing them with its modern transformation. They would control that message by overseeing nearly every aspect of tourism. China took to heart the boast of the tourism industry that every foreign visitor was a potential citizen ambassador to the world.
No one better exemplifies this approach than Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader who opened up the country to the world. Shortly after he wrested power in late 1978, Deng gave five talks on the central role of tourism. The titles don’t translate well: “Tourism Should Become a Comprehensive Industry,” and “There’s a Lot To Be Achieved Through Tourism.” But the overall message was strong. Tourism was essential to China’s new “open door” policy to rejoin the world and become appreciated and respected again as a major power. Deng saw big financial gains and even set the seemingly impossible goal for China to earn $10 billion from foreign tourism by the new millennium. China reached that goal four years ahead of schedule in 1996.
Thirty years later, during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Deng’s dreams were fulfilled several times over. This was China’s coming-out party. The Chinese spent $40 billion on stadiums for the Olympics and infrastructure. The International Olympic Committee earned $1.7 billion from broadcast revenue for advertising. The city of Beijing moved more than 1 million people out of their homes to make way for the Olympic site. World-renowned architects designed the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium, the “Water Cube” National Swimming Center, the “Z crisscross” television tower and the “Eggshell” National Grand Theater. Beijing added a fifth ring road, dubbed the “Olympic Avenue,” around the city; the sixth was completed one year later. Around the world 4 billion people watched some of the games; the biggest hit was the elaborate opening ceremony with drums, dancing, acrobats and a cast of 10,000 that would have put Hollywood to shame. The word “fireworks” doesn’t begin to do justice to the curtains of coordinated light that flooded the sky. The performers were polished and acted in astonishing unison. They repeated a similarly spectacular closing event after the world had watched more than eleven thousand athletes straining for a gold medal. Finally, China won fifty-one gold medals, topping all other competing nations.
There were more than a few problems: severe government censorship, pollution and the heavy-handed reconstruction of Beijing that turned it into a modern “Anywhere” city. But the Olympics went off without a hitch. The world applauded China’s vitality and its modern image framed by reminders of its old culture. (Unfortunately, the Olympics were held as the global economy went into a recession, and it took several years before tourism rebounded, negating the short-term benefits the government had expected.)
Despite all of the hoopla over the Olympics and the daily reporting about China’s economic miracle, many of today’s tourists to China are surprised, if not starry-eyed, at what they see. For example, I met three couples from suburban Washington, D.C., on a cool October morning for tai chi lessons on the grounds of the fifteenth-century Temple of Heaven, a masterpiece of architecture and landscape gardening now surrounded by the city of Beijing.
It was the last day in Beijing for Herb and Ellen Herscowitz, Donald and Susan Poretz, and Arthur and Amy Kales. They are all professionals; the men are medical doctors highly regarded in their fields. They are near retirement age and grew up with all those contradictory images of China. They subscribe to the Washington Post and the New York Times and read the articles about China’s modernization, yet they were flabbergasted at what they had seen on their first trip to China.
“The size of the buildings, the way people dress is unbelievable. So is the hustle, the commerce, even the airport. When we landed it was like being any place in the U.S., only not as crowded,” said Susan Poretz.
“We can’t believe how modern this country is. And we haven’t seen any police. I thought this was supposed to be a police state,” said Arthur Kales.
The three couples began their tour visiting the must-see classics: the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. They ate Peking duck at a restaurant where they had had to order the duck one week in advance.
Amy Kales said, “I thought the people would be solemn, dreary. They aren’t.”
Another Washington couple was just as impressed after their three-week trip to China. Rick and Jewell Dassance are retired and spent months diligently reading travel books on China as well as histories and novels. They thought they were prepared for their first visit to China. Instead, they said they were blown away by the country.
“I don’t know what I was expecting—I think I thought China would be like Senegal, you know, a Third World country where you might be staying in a nice compound but right outside is squalor. But I didn’t see squalor. The roads were good, the plumbing, electricity. I wasn’t prepared to see that level of development. I wasn’t aware of the magnitude of the changes. It was so educational for me,” said Rick Dassance.
His wife Jewell said the size of the country shocked her. “The sheer number of people in those cities was unbelievable. I started calling the cities and their apartment buildings concrete forests. I know, I had read about China’s modernization, but to see it in reality is a different experience. . . . Now I know it in my bones.”
Those reactions, transforming tourists into political emissaries, are what Deng Xiaoping had in mind thirty years earlier when he summoned his aides and told them tourism could change his country’s image.
China is the new center of the universe, the new Middle Kingdom. Mention China and experts spew superlatives. The country is skyrocketing in popularity, and the Chinese people are becoming the most sought-after tourists of the twenty-first century, spending lots of money and taking full advantage of their new ability to travel the world. The statistics point to even more record-breaking accomplishments. China will replace France as the most popular tourist destination in the world no later than 2020. China climbed to number three in 2011, according to the U.N. tourism organization, and earned $45 billion from foreign tourists, the fourth-highest amount in the world. If Hong Kong, with its high-end shopping for tourists, and Macao, with its gambling casinos, were included in that total, the sum would nearly double to $86 billion.
The flood of Chinese tourists visiting foreign countries for the first time is just as phenomenal. Tourism ministries swoon over this China “outbound market” that has grown 22 percent each year, on average, for three years, ranking fourth in the world by 2011. The U.N. tourism organization expects China to be the number-one source of tourists about the same time as it becomes the number-one destination for foreigners. And over the past five years Chinese tourists have become among the biggest spenders on overseas vacations, surpassing the British by shelling out $55 billion in 2010. Because they tend to save money on hotels and airfares, they are only third in the overall rankings of big spenders, behind German and American tourists.
Behind all of the hyperexcitement about Chinese tourism is the often-forgotten fact that Chinese tourism came out of nowhere. For most of the twentieth century China wasn’t part of the tourism industry. The Chinese government had no interest in opening their country to foreign tourists or allowing the Chinese to travel overseas. The Chinese had to wait until 1997 to win the right to travel abroad in tour groups, and then they were allowed to visit only a few government-approved destinations. It wasn’t until 2009 that the government gave the green light to true overseas foreign travel and dropped some of the tightest restrictions. The Chinese middle class was earning the money to travel but lacked the time. In 2000 the government finally declared guaranteed paid national holidays celebrating Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year) in late January or February, and the country’s National Day in October. The two long holidays are known as the “Golden Weeks.”
This is the story of how the tourism industry has changed China and how China is changing the industry.
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My first short visit to China was in December 1978. The streets of Beijing were dimly lit, the air dry and dusty. My cheeks felt like cold sandpaper when I walked outside. Evening rush hour was announced by crowds of bicyclists streaming home, their tires swishing through the shadows, their bells pinging in a staccato rhythm. There were few hotels for the rare foreign visitors; I stayed at the Friendship Hotel, a Chinese-modern establishment built in 1954 with grand proportions. I was a journalist heading to Cambodia on assignment, which in those days required a layover in Beijing. I had time to explore the city.
Hidden behind that sleepy façade was a city in political turmoil. A French colleague, the journalist Francis Deron, took me to the heart of the public debate, cutting through the city’s distinctive hutongs, or alleys, in a circuitous route that ended at a bus station. Plastered across a high wall were protest posters written in bold black characters asking for individual rights and freedoms, and democracy. This was “Democracy Wall,” where small groups of Chinese men were engrossed in conversation and glancing over their shoulders. Later, at an informal market, I bought a scroll painting of sparrows on bamboo from an artist who asked Francis what I was doing in China. We had to shake off a small crowd following us. On the way back to the hotel it dawned on me that we had seen very few traces of the old palaces or temples. In India, the cities are a mishmash of Hindu temples and Muslim mosques, walled forts and marble palaces, alongside modern villas and new office blocks; the ancient and the new butting up against each other.
I had seen only a glimpse of the calculated destruction of the city’s heritage—what Chinese artists and preservationists have called “death by a thousand cuts.”
Ideology drove the first wave of destruction. It is hard to exaggerate the exhilaration that the Chinese Communists said they felt at their victory in 1949. They had defeated their Chinese rivals led by Chiang Kai-shek and shaken off the United States. Under the leadership of Mao, the Chinese People’s Republic was a single-minded experiment to fashion a new socialist society of equality in a country that had been ruled largely by imperial dynasties. The initial idealism sparked needed reforms in the health system and the redistribution of land in favor of poor farmers.
When Mao Zedong entered Beijing to enthusiastic crowds, the city was encompassed by 25 miles of thick crenellated stone walls with sixteen multistory gates, many guarded by stone lions. Outside the walls were moats and farms. Inside the walls was a city planned to reflect the harmony of heaven. Set at the edge of the great northern plains, Beijing, or the North Capital, was a well-planned city of “palaces, peony beds, lotus-filled lakes, dragon walls, carved lions embodying the antithetical yet complimentary principles of yin and yang,” according to earlier visitors like Arnold Toynbee. The Imperial Palace, known as the Forbidden City, sat at the geographic and celestial center of the city, surrounded by other palaces, temples, vast Asian gardens, archways over the wide streets and a labyrinth of hutongs leading to traditional houses built with central courtyards mimicking the larger harmony of the city. As charming as Paris and as mysterious as the Sphinx, Beijing was considered one of the world’s great marvels.
Within ten years most of that ancient Beijing that had been built over five hundred years had been torn down on orders of the government. The reason was political. The city’s plan followed the feudal order of imperial China and the new leaders wanted a socialist city.
“The very map of Peking was a reflection of the feudal society, it was meant to demonstrate the absolute power of the emperor. We had to transform it, we had to make Peking into the capital of socialist China,” said Professor Ho Renzhi of Peking University to the journalist Tiziano Terzani.
It was the equivalent of tearing down central Rome because it represented the Italian past of empire and medieval feudalism. First, the Chinese Communists tore down the “pailos” or arches, in marble and painted wood that were built across the major streets in honor of revered citizens of China. Next, the walls came down. In 1950 the Communists ordered the famed walls removed at night, to avoid citizens’ anger. Liang Sicheng, one of China’s best architects at the time, wrote that “it was as if my own flesh was being torn off, as if my skin was being peeled away.” He was denounced for his right-wing tendencies and died in disgrace.
This cultural suicide continued. In 1958 the government officials surveyed the city and declared that 8,000 monuments and buildings were of cultural value and worth saving. Yet political powers overrode that survey and only 78 of those structures were allowed to remain standing. Some were removed to make way for small-scale factories and industries; others for dormitories, apartments or barracks. Centuries-old temples were razed as unnecessary as the country geared up for the Great Leap Forward and, in their place, were built 1,400 factories in the center of Beijing. The Abundant Tranquility Temple and the Sleeping Buddha Temple were destroyed to build new roads. Palaces were turned over to work units and the military.
The authorities tore down thousands of Beijing’s courtyard houses, which had defined northern Chinese architecture since the twelfth century. Every storybook about old China is illustrated with paintings of modest homes with curved roofs, windows of paper inside lattice frames, with a small garden enclosed by walls. In place of those temples and palaces, walls and gateways, the new Chinese authorities built massive modern public buildings with exposition halls and enormous conference rooms in a style that was bland at best, and at its worst was grotesque. This modernization purposefully eliminated centuries of culture in order to remake Beijing into a symbol of socialist China. Acting more like officials in Dubai than in Paris, the Chinese tore apart the city, turning it into a chaotic shell, without the exquisite references and planning of old Beijing.
Then in 1958, Mao organized the Chinese in a campaign to make a Great Leap Forward to become a modern, self-sufficient economy. All private landholdings ended and farms were melded into large public communes. Local, even backyard, factories went up all over the country. The experiment collapsed in three years. The economy was in shambles; agriculture was devastated with such poor harvests that China suffered a famine that left tens of millions dead. The backyard factories produced shoddy goods and wasted precious energy.
At first, Mao admitted he had made mistakes. Then, in 1966, he reasserted his power, calling for a Cultural Revolution to radicalize the country through its youth, targeting his rivals in the Communist elite. The young Red Guard went after those in authority, the potential rivals of Mao, and pushed China into further chaos.
Most of this was hidden from the rest of the world. From the beginning, Chinese Communist leaders wanted to shut out foreign influences that had been so detested during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to cut off their economy from the capitalist system. For their part, the western countries, especially the United States, sought to deny legitimacy to the new, Communist China and recognized Taiwan as the “real” China. This deep physical and political division was known as the “Bamboo Curtain” in Asia, erected by China but reinforced by the West.
Through this tumultuous period, there was no tourism to speak of. Foreign visitors were largely delegations from friendly nations or foreign political parties who visited to nurture alliances. The government created the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) and the China International Travel Service in 1956 to organize these largely diplomatic visitors in a new campaign to “Spread Chairman Mao Thought, Assist World Revolution.” Western Europeans were allowed to visit China, albeit under strict controls. The numbers were minuscule: over the next decade only 19,000 foreign visitors from 38 countries came to China, a nation of 740 million in 1966.
Some of the foreign visitors were experts sent to help Chinese development. Others were foreign students from other Communist countries or overseas Chinese students from Southeast Asian countries. Even this small trickle of visitors ended with the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guard took aim at foreigners. Most foreign experts left and several foreign embassies were burned to the ground. No more foreign students were accepted.
In 1971, when China regained its seat at the United Nations that had been held by Taiwan, the country slowly opened. The CNTA could only handle a few thousand tourists at a time, organized in groups with official sponsors; there were exactly 2,500 beds for foreigners in Beijing in the mid-1970s.
It was equally difficult for the Chinese to travel in their own country. Every trip required official permission, which was given sparingly for official business, family visits or medical treatment. During the 1950s most Chinese travelers stayed at canteens, or simple guest houses, which offered a desk, a bed, a wash basin and a common toilet. In the 1960s cities like Beijing built small hotels for elite Chinese visitors, mostly political bureaucrats visiting the capital on official business. Given that history of isolation and even xenophobia, as well as the strict restriction of movement within the country, Deng Xiaoping’s early call to open China to foreign tourists came straight out of the blue.
• • •
In October 1978, Deng was in the throes of a high-stakes power contest to succeed Mao Zedong, who had died two years earlier. Deng took time out to deliver the first of what were described as five “directional talks” about the importance of tourism. These small talks are rarely if ever mentioned in the many books that describe how China engineered its monumental reversal from radical communism to aggressive state-controlled capitalism in the tidal wave of reforms that propelled China from poverty to superpower status in less than four decades.
To underline his seriousness about the subject, Deng delivered his next talks about tourism in January 1979, soon after he emerged from the critical meeting that consolidated his power. He gave talks about the importance of tourism in the new China to top government officials, to the small government tourist bureau and to state industries. Saying that China had wasted too much time and resources on heavy industry, he said “we should start to develop industries that would accelerate capital circulation and help earn foreign currency, such as light industries, manufacturing, trade and tourism.”
“Our country is huge, with many cultural relics and heritages. If we receive five million visitors, with per capita tourist expenditure at $1,000 we could earn foreign currency of $5 billion in one year,” he said adding in another of these talks that “we can earn more money quickly through tourism.”
Tourism met both of Deng’s basic requirements for China’s economic transformation, called “Opening and Reform,” to develop China’s economy in a more capitalist mode while remaining under Communist rule. In Deng’s talks he said that tourism could do both and enhance China’s world image.
He envisioned tourists coming to China to see the country’s landscape, go dancing, play billiards and stay in hotels that had yet to be built. He said tourism would require foreign investment and foreign partnerships, bring in foreign tourists and their money, and create “huge employment opportunities for youth.”
“We should build hotels,” he said. “In the first stage, we can make use of Overseas Chinese and foreign investments. Afterwards, we can develop on our own.”
For one talk on tourism, Deng trekked up China’s Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), the subject of countless landscape paintings and poems. In the official photograph of his visit, Deng, who was only 5 feet tall, poses on the trail wearing dark Bermuda shorts, a white tee-shirt and white socks bunching up around his ankles. That image was slightly shocking for a leader who normally wore buttoned-up Mao suits. Deng was conveying his idea of a tourist at leisure, down to resting on a hiker’s cane. His message was simple. China’s leader was endorsing tourism at Huangshan, one of China’s most renowned mountain landscapes. Everyone was expected to fall in line behind him and build up the industry.
Another surprise in these tourism talks was Tibet. Deng singled out Tibet as a key attraction in his vision of Chinese tourism. “We should develop tourist routes to Tibet. Foreigners are interested in Tibet. . . . We should build hotels in Lhasa,” he said, conjuring up images of planeloads of tourists drawn to exotic Tibet and spending their money in new hotels built by the Chinese.
China’s rule of Tibet has prompted bitter condemnation since Chinese troops marched into the Himalayan country in 1950 and asserted it was part of China. Tibetans have rebelled intermittently ever since against Chinese Communist rule over their strict Buddhist culture; Tibetan monks burn themselves in protest against Chinese heavy-handedness. Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama received a Nobel Prize for his peaceful protest against Chinese rule, and movie stars have joined the global Free Tibet movement to force the Chinese to listen to international public opinion.
Tourism is the one policy that has diluted this opprobrium over China’s handling of Tibet. It took two decades to realize Deng’s vision of building a modern rail link to whisk tourists to the Himalayan kingdom, but once that was accomplished, nearly 2 million tourists have visited Tibet every year. They are entranced by the pagodas and palaces carved on the rooftop of the world. And their Chinese guides give the tourists a happy version of the recent history that tourists accept as something close to the truth. To the list of reasons why China refuses to give Tibet greater freedom and autonomy, add tourism and the $300 million spent every year by the 3 million visitors.
Deng’s tourism talks were farsighted in predicting the downside of China for tourists. The main problem, he said, was pollution, and this was in 1979 when China’s pollution problems were minor compared to what China faces today. Deng used the example of Guilin, a city encircled by mountains and divided by two rivers to underline how China’s industrial growth threatened the environment and, therefore, tourism. “Water pollution in the Lijiang River is very serious. We must do everything to prevent it. Factories that caused water pollution should be closed. Mountain and water scenery in Guilin is the best in the world. If the water is not clean, how can tourism be sustainable?”
He also said the Chinese had lost their instinct for hospitality and become inept if not boring when it came to entertaining foreign tourists. He wanted China to build cinemas and entertainment spaces and be welcoming to tourists. “Who will pay money and come for a visit if service attitudes are not good and the place is dirty? Even if some may have come, they would not have satisfaction.” The answer was training, he said, for interpreters, guides, service staff and management teams. “There should be programs to train tourism professionals. The service staff should learn foreign languages, and tour guides should know tour regulations.”
In the top-down political structure of the government, Deng’s five tourism talks were translated into a set of basic principles for the tourism bureau and other government agencies. China became a member of the United Nations World Tourism Organization in 1983 and immediately impressed officials there. China asked for help to make domestic and international tourism a central part of its economic development and to boost its chances of becoming a global power. That same year, China held its first international tourism conference. “I believe it was one of the first international conferences on any subject that China held after it opened up,” said Patrice Tedjini, head of the UNWTO’s archives and its informal historian. “China understands tourism.”
Barbara Dawson, a tour operator in Colorado, was an American delegate to that conference. She and her Canadian husband were pioneers in China travel and had shepherded their first tours in 1979. “We took a group from the Atmospheric Research Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We had to negotiate everything with a national guide, local guides and a Communist Party person. They wanted to show us factories and communes. We wanted to see art and culture,” said Dawson. “We loved it; these were trips of a lifetime.”
The Chinese invited delegates from countries on every continent to this conference to explain how they were open for tourism and how they hoped to learn from the delegates how to run a modern tourism industry. It was cold for early spring and Dawson remembers a stiff wind blowing in sand from the Gobi Desert. All that made the prospect of China’s tourism future more exciting.
“There were a lot of banquets and speeches. It was like a coming-out party,” she said.
She still has the conference souvenir of a silk brocade box filled with an ink stone, brushes, writing paper and a chop or seal to be engraved.
Dawson was hooked. As a dedicated tourist agent, she watched China’s metamorphic transformation, measuring progress by the number of airlines flying into China and the number of available hotel rooms. In 1983 there were three airlines available: Air Canada, Philippine Airlines and Singapore Airlines. There were only three good hotels for foreigners: the Beijing, the Friendship and the Evergreen. Lindblad and Abercrombie & Fitch were the only tour groups working in China. The Chinese guides were often ham-fisted, and the government controlled the message to tourists as if they were political delegates. “They wanted us to know that China was different from Russia—the Soviet Union—that China was socialist and Russia was Communist,” said Dawson.
Deng scored his first impressive economic victory in 1984 when China had the single largest grain harvest in its history. The lives of Chinese improved and their treatment of tourists improved as well, Dawson said. “This made my life so much easier,” she said. “The Chinese were able to see greater horizons, and became so much more perceptive, tourist professionals.”
That year the Great Wall Hotel opened in Beijing, the first of what would become a boom of modern chrome-and-glass hotels that hasn’t abated. The hotel was a Sino-American venture. Dean Ho, now of Unison Building Systems in Shanghai, helped put together the deal. He represented a private investor in the project that included the Beijing branch of the China National Tourist Office as the equity partner, a model that continues today. The hotel, he told me, proved “highly profitable” both for the foreign investors and for the Chinese who were the majority owners. “One hundred percent funded by American dollars, one hundred percent filled with foreign tourists who paid in American dollars while all local labor costs were paid in the Chinese currency renminbi,” he said.
Foreign tourists still traveled in groups with itineraries largely under the control of the official state tourism agency: the visitors had no choice over their hotels or restaurants, and their tour guides were trained by the government to deliver a narrow political message.
Nothing better exemplified this than the June 1989 bloodbath at Tiananmen Square, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army broke up a popular, nonviolent demonstration by young Chinese asking for democracy. The soldiers, under orders from Deng Xiaoping, used lethal force and murdered thousands of citizens, leaving their bodies littering Tiananmen and the nearby streets. The world was outraged, but most of the foreign tourists in China were oblivious. If they weren’t in Beijing, they didn’t know anything had happened. All the news had been blocked out, and the guides were told to stick to the standard praise about their country’s progress. “A tour group in the south kept traveling and didn’t know what was going on in Tiananmen until they called home to check on their families,” said Dawson. “I don’t think the Chinese will ever give up that kind of control.”
That episode exemplified China’s political quandary as it focused on economic gains while papering over any questions about human rights or protecting the environment. The government wanted to create a tourist market inside China by wooing foreign investors. At the same time, the Chinese government wanted to censor the image presented to the foreigners through their system of guides and marketing, with a uniform interpretation of China’s recent past, an enthusiastic presentation of contemporary life and little room to hear an alternative view.
China had to become much more accommodating. Itineraries expanded far beyond the once bare-bones tour of Beijing, Shanghai and a train trip to Hong Kong. China gradually allowed tourists throughout the vast nation from Harbin in the north near the Russian border to Guilin in the south near Vietnam. Other rules were relaxed. Tourists could eat in private restaurants along the bund in Shanghai. Bars were opening in Beijing and Shanghai.
“All of a sudden, China was the place to go. Sometimes I thought there were more travel writers in China than tourists—each trying to get stories saying they were the first to get to go somewhere that had been closed off for forty years,” said Dawson. “The airlines saw the market. They expanded. Everyone saw the opportunities. It was a tremendous experience going through all of that.”
Equally important was the Chinese government’s fundamental decision to open up travel for Chinese people within China. The strict rules preventing the Chinese from moving around their country were dropped, and for the first time since the revolution the Chinese could hop on a bus and see the mountains, or the cities, or the sea, or the Great Wall. Officials undertook what amounted to a “tourism reeducation” campaign to expand the definition of Chinese travel beyond the traditional visits home during the lunar New Year, to find work, to serve in the army, or to study, but not to simply enjoy themselves. In those early years “leisure travel,” or tourism, was a foreign concept.
The Chinese entering the new middle class needed little encouragement. In the 1990s, Chinese tour buses carried these newly minted tourists along newly paved and widened highways, trailing dark diesel fumes behind them. Parking lots the size of football fields were cut into national parks and near historic sites. Provincial and local governments threw up auditorium-size canteens to serve mediocre meals and sell souvenirs. Some tourists had to be told not to spit, or shove to be first in line. Many were unaccustomed to modern flush toilets. All seemed happy.
To keep up the momentum, the government subsidized much of this travel and built up the new “destinations.” National holidays were given for Chinese New Year and in autumn.
To tie it all together, the government named these vacations “Golden Weeks.” Now enshrined in law and custom, these weeks have proved golden for the tourists with precious time off and for the local industry with golden profits. From 1995 to 2005, travel within China rose by more than 50 percent, which, in a country that was then nearing 1 billion people, added up to millions of dollars spent on bus tickets, admission fees, new travel outfits, souvenirs and those requisite photographs. By 2010, Chinese tourists had spent $123 billion traveling around their own country in 1.5 billion getaways.
This was a dress rehearsal for the next stage in China’s tourism ambitions: letting these new Chinese tourists venture outside their country. The door was open ever so slightly in 1983, after the International Tourism Conference in Beijing, when the Chinese were allowed “family visits” to their relatives in Hong Kong and Macao so long as these overseas families paid all the expense. Chinese were forbidden to exchange their renminbi into hard currency for overseas travel. A few years later, family visits were allowed to relatives in nearby Southeast Asian nations.
It wasn’t until 1999 that Chinese tourists were given passports to travel abroad just for fun. Restrictions were built into these first “leisure” tours. Chinese tourists had to travel in groups with Chinese tour operators and deposit at least $3,000 in cash as a surety bond that they would return to China. Those first years, some Chinese were “lost” and didn’t get back on the airplane. When that happened, the tour company was warned it could be removed from the Chinese government’s approved list.
Australia and New Zealand were the first two countries to win “approved destination” status to receive these first Chinese tourists, a privilege that turned out to be a mixed blessing. They accepted China’s special visas for tour groups and were willing to work with the Chinese tour operators that brought them over and organized their trips in a program entitled “Provisional Regulation on the Management of Outbound Travel by Chinese Citizens at Their Own Expense.” The program was full of missteps those first years and the Chinese bureaucracy was horrendous. The Chinese tour operators were often cutthroat. And those Chinese tourists weren’t sure what they were supposed to do in these foreign countries.
Australia and New Zealand were the guinea pigs for the rest of the world. George Hickton was the brand-new CEO of Tourism New Zealand those first years of the experiment. New Zealand was experiencing an explosion of tourism—growing by 60 percent from 1999 to 2009 after long-haul airplanes were able to fly directly to the island nation from the United States.
It was a remarkable era, and Hickton found himself in the role of educating these Chinese tourist consumers and reining in the cut-rate Chinese tour operators. Hickton smiled when remembering the headaches of those years—a Chinese opera of naive tourists exploited by tour groups who acted like pirates, cheating their countrymen and women at every turn.
“They brought in low-market tourism at the cheapest price and gave them the worst experience,” he said.
The rip-off began with the price. Many tour-bus operators charged less than $50 a day to attract as many tourists as possible. But $50 didn’t go far in New Zealand. So instead of seeing New Zealand’s breathtaking landscapes and fine vistas, many of these Chinese tourists were holed up in uninspiring hotels and fed miserably. They were shuttled around in crowded buses to shopping emporiums where they were strongly encouraged to buy tacky souvenirs because the tour operator got a commission from the sales. After a few years of such tours, New Zealand had earned a poor reputation among Chinese tourists. Hickton said he and the New Zealand tourism agency were concerned that they had no control over the questionable Chinese tour operators who won the concession to run these lucrative overseas tours from the Chinese government’s tourism bureau.
“We couldn’t afford to be swamped by the high volume of poor tours,” he told me when we met at a tourism conference. “We had to reject a few of the Chinese tour operators.”
New Zealand’s only recourse was to renegotiate the tourism agreement with China, resulting in a new 2010 “code of conduct” that revised the “approved destination agreement” to eliminate most of the shadier practices. New Zealand had no choice. Tourism was becoming the single largest export industry—ahead of even lamb and butter. If New Zealand hadn’t overhauled the Chinese tours, it could have infected the country’s tourism campaign, which markets itself with the slogan “100% Pure New Zealand.” In the end, New Zealand recovered and the Chinese revived their opinion of travel there.
“It wasn’t easy,” said Hickton, adding quickly that it was worth the effort, since China has surpassed Japan as one of New Zealand’s top sources of tourism, growing from 20,000 to 120,000 visits a year in the last decade.
China soon added other countries to its approved list. Each agreement required the approval of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security (the national police) as well as the national tourism administration. Malta, Germany and Hungary were the first European countries to join the list in 2002 and 2003. The next year twenty-one European countries were added, including France, Belgium, Austria, Greece, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands. By the end of the year African countries like Ethiopia and Zimbabwe were approved to accept Chinese tour groups. By 2011 the list had grown to 135 countries, including the United States and Canada.
Now the competition was on to woo the newly wealthy Chinese tourists. Several European nations commissioned the U.N. Tourism Organization to undertake a study of these Chinese outbound tourists. The findings confirmed many rumors about the Chinese and added surprising details.
The profile that emerged confirmed the obvious: Chinese tourists live for shopping; it takes up as much as 65 percent of their travel budget. They are so intent on buying things that they are tightwads when it comes to paying for airfare or a hotel. They sign up for cheap hotels in the suburbs and supereconomy airfare in order to spend more money shopping. At the same time, they complain that those cheap hotels are far from the nightlife and that the food is lousy. Generally, they craved Chinese food when they were abroad. Other than shopping, Chinese tourists enjoyed learning about famous European writers and artists, especially visiting their homes that had been turned into museums: Claude Monet’s home in Giverny; Beethoven’s home in Bonn. They liked the boulevard life of lazy afternoons whiling away the hours at a café, getting lost in crowds along the grand boulevards and seeing the art and architecture of Europe’s great cities.
They shop for brand names, luxury clothes, jewelry, luggage and whisky, anything with prestige. To that end, Chinese tourists are becoming the world’s newest big spenders. The money is impressive. Worldwide, Chinese tourists spent nearly $55 billion in 2011. This level of spending can alter tourism markets. In France the steadily rising flow of Chinese tourists has been the equivalent of a small stimulus package in the time of the global recession, with the Chinese spending over $900 million in 2011. Thanks in part to their travels, the Chinese are learning to love wine—especially French wine—and have put China in the top five wine-consuming countries in the world, besting even Great Britain.
One study found that while Chinese tourists typically spend 8 percent of their discretionary income on a single trip within China, they can double that amount on a trip abroad, often traveling with a list of goods to buy for their friends. In London, they have surpassed shoppers from Russia, the United States and the Gulf states as the biggest spenders, according to tax-refund records of luxury-goods stores there.
France comes out on top of survey after survey as the country the Chinese most want to visit. Chinese tourists know France by its icons: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre. They associate the French with elegance, history, romance and luxury. And the French were among the first to see the potential of wooing Chinese tourists. France was one of the first countries to translate its official tourist website into Chinese. French tourist officials prodded businesses to prepare for the Chinese before the first tour groups arrived in 2003, recruiting Sino-French chefs to prepare Chinese food, finding Chinese-speaking tour guides and especially Chinese translators for department stores.
Today the Chinese version of the grand tour of foreign countries looks more like a grand shopping spree. Chinese translators are poised at cosmetics counters, lingerie departments and handbags. Chinese speakers are available for personal shopping, and some stores have special entrances for Chinese tour groups. While this is nothing new for France—the French were just as accommodating for the Japanese when they first began traveling in the 1960s—the volume of the Chinese tourists has outpaced earlier waves of new foreign tourists.
Cultural clashes are inevitable. Christian Delom, the senior French tourism official, said his agency is “monitoring” the Chinese tour operators to make sure they are following the rules, similar to the stance of New Zealand’s Hickton, who found those operators gouging the planeloads of their fellow Chinese tourists. At the same time, the Chinese government is training the tour operators and the Chinese tourists themselves, giving them handouts reminding them that they are cultural “ambassadors” of China and should behave accordingly—no shouting, no spitting and no disputing prices at luxury stores.
Matteo, our guide in Venice, repeated universal fears that Chinese tour operators were ruining legitimate Italian businesses by dropping off their tourists at stores and pizza parlors newly purchased by the Chinese. “They serve ‘pizza’ that doesn’t taste like pizza,” he said. Matteo also pointed to the stores that sold Chinese tourists “Venetian glass” that was made in China.
Chinese tourists and their money is topic number one in the global tourism industry. Rashmi Sharma is a jeweler and owner of the high-end Jewels of Africa boutiques in Zambia. She said Chinese visitors buy some of her most expensive pieces, so much so that several Chinese businessmen want to become her partners. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she told me at her store in the Lusaka Intercontinental Hotel. “They are very good businessmen.”
In New York, business owners were offered a two-day seminar on how to attract Chinese tourists into their stores. The fee to attend was $900 a person. ChinaContact, the organizer, promised to reveal the latest data tracking Chinese tourists’ “brand perceptions, travel habits, purchase preferences and service expectations.” Senior executives from luxury companies like Cartier, Tumi and Bergdorf Goodman would share their secrets. One of the big enticements was the latest calculation that showed Chinese tourists spent $7 billion overseas during the 2012 Chinese New Year. The pitch was simple: in 2015, only three years away, the Chinese would be the single largest source of international tourism.
Roy Graff, the host of the event, was ecstatic with the turnout: “The guest list read like a walk up the entire 5th Avenue of New York—top fashion, jewelry and cosmetics brands, luxury hotel chains and marketing agencies came to listen and learn about China’s wealthy consumers.”