China is at the center of the tourism gold rush. Everyone wants a piece of the action. International hotel chains unimpressed with anemic economies in Europe and North America are multiplying their properties in China every year. Young European, Asian and American tourism professionals manage and train the Chinese in tourism. They stay within the bounds set by the government tourism officials because the rewards can be stunning.
The wealth being accumulated is astronomical. As of 2011, China had 271 billionaires and 960,000 millionaires. Asia now has more millionaires than Europe and could surpass North America shortly. And tourism is one of the great cash cows for the Chinese economy; by 2020, when China is expected to become the number-one destination, tourism will provide over 10 percent of China’s GDP. To keep up with all those tourists, China is expected to need 5,000 additional new passenger airplanes at a cost of $600 billion.
Typical of the tourism professionals lured to China is Javier Albar, a Spaniard with a degree in hospitality from Oxford Brookes University in Great Britain. He has spent most of his career in Asia, in South Korea and Hong Kong before becoming general manager of the Beijing Marriott Hotel City Wall. It is Marriott’s biggest hotel outside of the U.S., and when I met him in Beijing in October 2011, he said he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
“China is a different animal from any other country today,” he said. “It went through the revolution of Mao Zedong and all of those terrible things. Mao actually did several good things. He united the country and he set the ground for the growth of today. Now the country is becoming wealthy, the young are impatient; there are problems of expectations and inequality; everyone wants to get ahead. After what has happened over the last thirty years, who knows what will happen in the near future. The country is very alive. And I want to be here.”
The first and most important requirement for doing well in the Chinese tourism industry is having the right connections to the government. China is a one-party state where top officials, their cohorts and their children—known as princelings, or the “red nobility”—play the decisive role in cutting through the bureaucracy to win the licenses and permissions necessary to do business. In all areas the most important decisions are made behind closed doors, a situation that has led to calls for better and more open legal structures and supervision of business dealings. Since the government retains control over the tourism industry in China from the top to the bottom, connections are essential.
“You can have all the resources, the expertise and professionals working for you, but you are nothing without contacts,” said Albar. “Connections bring you to the table.”
For Marriott International, those connections came overnight with the 1997 acquisition of the Renaissance Hotel Group. The principal owner of Renaissance was the New World Development Company, a Chinese real estate and hotel powerhouse run by Dr. Henry K. S. Cheng. With that purchase Marriott went from running nothing in China to managing forty hotels and became connected to Dr. Cheng. His political ties go to the top of the Chinese government, and he is a member of the standing committee of the Eleventh Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of the People’s Republic of China. With that political heft and his wealth, Dr. Cheng’s views are heard at the very top of the government. He is the ideal patron required for any international tourist group.
With that partnership Marriott has a presence in China, adding hotels and attracting tourists, conventions, business travelers and local Chinese events. Bringing local Chinese business into his hotel is part of a larger ambition, said Albar, to transform the Chinese into fans of Marriott when they travel abroad.
“Our number-one objective here is to attract inbound travelers to China to stay at our hotels. Our number-two objective is to influence Chinese outbound travelers to choose Marriott when they travel overseas,” he said. “The market is that strong.”
As an example he cited a twenty-four-year-old Beijing couple that held their wedding reception at his hotel. “It was elegant—food, flowers. When they went to the U.S., they booked at a Marriott. They went to France, they booked at a Marriott.”
Like every other tourism professional in China, Albar knows his profits depend on capturing a share of the outbound as well as the inbound China trade. Marriott announced plans to open its hundredth hotel in China by 2015, a schedule that will require opening one hotel every month for three years.
The competition is fierce. International-brand hotels—those owned by the Chinese but designed and managed by an international chain—are opening faster in China than anywhere else on the planet. “China, China, China” is the mantra for major chains like Hilton, Intercontinental, Four Seasons, Hyatt, Ritz-Carlton, Marriott and Starwood. In the five years ending in 2012, the number of international-brand hotel rooms grew 62 percent, and that’s just the beginning of the boom.
By 2014, Hilton will have quadrupled the number of hotels it manages in China. Hyatt Hotels Corporation is doubling the number of hotels it manages in China. The Starwood brand, which includes Sheraton hotels, is building its largest resort hotel in Macao, and industry projections show that China could become its most important market soon, outpacing the United States. All of this adds up to a 50 percent increase in international-brand hotel rooms by 2015—a thought that raises fears of one big hotel bubble that will burst and send occupancy rates plunging.
David Barboza, the Shanghai bureau chief for the New York Times, who has lived in China for over a decade, has seen hotel business shoot through the roof. “They are doing very well with room rates up and labor costs still low. They give you great service with no labor costs to speak of—about the same as in Mexico.”
A few years ago the Chinese government published figures showing that the average monthly wage for Chinese chambermaids was $97 and for hotel receptionists, $133. (In Hong Kong a receptionist was paid $1,305.) At the same time, international-brand hotels were charging $125 a night for a room. While wages have gone up—analysts say to around $200 a month on average—so have average hotel prices to $225. China’s five-star hotels are no longer one of the world’s great bargains.
Low wages are an essential source of those handsome profits. When Deng opened up the economy, he outlawed strikes in 1982 and kept Chinese unions under government control. In return, the unions have kept labor costs down, attracting foreign investment as well as flooding the global market with inexpensive goods. It is a public secret that union officials expect discreet cash payments from hotels and other services for tourists as a token of gratitude for those low labor costs.
Barboza said that in the mind of the government, the tourism sector has been a huge success and there was no reason to change its formula. “The Chinese state rakes in the money with licenses and monopolies and partnerships. Why would officials give it up?”
All these blue-sky predictions are hard-won. The day-to-day reality of running a hotel in China is complicated. During my four-day stay at the Marriott City Wall, I could see the cultural gaps and disconnects. At lunch one day at the hotel’s dim sum restaurant, I waited half an hour with no sign of my food. When I asked my waitress why none of my dishes had appeared, she answered, “You should have ordered something else.” At breakfast one morning a hostess interrupted a man filling his plate at the buffet, asking him to sign a check with his free hand so she could check off his room number. He wasn’t happy.
Albar said Marriott has worked overtime training new Chinese employees to be sensitive to sometimes extreme cultural misunderstanding.
“China is a completely different game than the other Asian countries, where hospitality is second nature,” he said. “The Chinese are animated people of wonderful character but little concept of hospitality, of putting guests first. Maybe it is communism. There are small things. You have to explain that when opening the door to bring in the luggage you have to watch out and not hit the guest in the nose.”
“There is also the bigger issue of saying thank you and please. Some Chinese consider saying thank you and please as somehow degrading. It’s understandable. These people have had to be fighters, survivors. We are saying now, your job is to help others, not compete with them.”
The gap reaches to the top. When Albar arranged for an international summit on women to be held at his Marriott hotel in 2010, the government balked. At least eight hundred delegates would be attending from around the world. “The government said it didn’t want the summit at my hotel, that it was too close to the central railroad station and that wouldn’t give a good impression. I had to go through higher government authorities to win clearance. The compromise was to have arrival cocktails at the People’s Hall,” said Albar. “Before, the hotel for a summit would have been fully under government control. Now officials are learning new ways. They say they want Beijing to have more conferences—they have to learn how we do it.”
As yet, there are no Chinese hotel chains and few mainland Chinese managers at the international hotels. Albar’s senior staff members are natives of India, Singapore and Malaysia.
“Some industries are more difficult for the Chinese to understand at this stage, especially ones like tourism that involves foreigners and their food, drink, behavior, entertainment,” said Albar. “In a decade, that could change.”
At first glance, this makes little sense. Chinese culture is great in part because of its cuisine and the enjoyment of food, drink and conversation. By the eighteenth century, China was crisscrossed with eating clubs, restaurants and inns. Chinese tea shops were crowded with travelers. Food stalls served prized snacks of the season—cakes, salt eggs, watermelon, sea scallops. Restaurants were known for their specialties, some for their service by beautiful young women. Buddhist temples served artful vegetarian meals on festival days. Chinese banquets could last days. The food was served on porcelain, the finest in the world, and eaten with chopsticks.
Jonathan D. Spence, the noted historian of China, points to the journal of the British ambassador to China in 1793, who wrote that “the poorest classes in China seem to understand the art of preparing their food much better than the same classes at home.”
During the Communist revolution the culinary and hospitality arts withered in China’s blizzard of change. Their revival has been tied to the economic boom. Like everything else, those Chinese habits and arts are being filtered through the desire to appeal to a global standard. The bridge for this has been overseas Chinese from Asia and North America. With their knowledge of the modern world as well as the old Chinese culture, these Chinese managers from Hong Kong or Singapore have helped lead the budding tourism industry with their practical abilities and their insight into what works in the Chinese context. Now, thirty years after the initial opening, native Chinese are taking their places in the tourism business.
One example is Zhang Mei, a rare woman entrepreneur in the Chinese tourism industry. She is the mirror image of Javier Albar. Zhang Mei is a young Chinese woman who founded her own company, a high-end boutique tour operation that has won accolades from experts like Condé Nast Traveler. Zhang and Albar agreed on most aspects of the tourism industry in China: its tremendous opportunities, the extraordinary role of government and the industry’s problems.
A native of the town of Dali in Yunnan Province, Zhang attended college at Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, and then Harvard, where she earned a master’s degree in business administration. She was unhappy at her first job in banking.
“So I took a sabbatical and traveled around the world: Northern Europe, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and South Africa,” she said. “I went to Tibet and Nepal in the Himalayas, which was probably the peak of my life.”
She ended up in her home province where, she said, she was struck by its stunning scenery and its potential for tourism. “After I had seen the rest of the world, I realized how beautiful Yunnan was and how great it would be for tourism.”
Impressed by the possibilities, Zhang resigned from her job, and in 2000, at the age of thirty, she started her own luxury tourism agency called WildChina from a small office in Beijing. “All of a sudden I became this take-charge entrepreneur. From there the snowball started rolling.”
Today she is a well-spoken, handsome woman who runs a company of fifty employees from her office in the diplomatic section of Beijing. Zhang said WildChina has a 25 percent profit margin, but she is anxious to “jump into the next class and grow the business.” With her solid base in the United States, she is broadening to include countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. Recently she added French and Spanish translations to her website.
Her top goal is to win official approval to operate tours in the United States for Chinese travelers. She sees the same pot of gold that Albar at Marriott sees: the money that can be made as millions of Chinese tourists travel for the first time.
I spent three days shadowing Zhang Mei as she plotted her next move while keeping an eye on her tour company. Zhang said WildChina’s popularity requires that she stay one step ahead of what until now has been pretty lousy competition. She is constantly reimagining tours, adding restaurants and fanciful twists on iconic visits. For a famous movie-star client, she turned a visit to the Great Wall into a sunset dinner party, serving supper on white tablecloths with the sun disappearing over the hills. “It is a way of seeing the familiar from a different angle—a wild moment,” Zhang said.
The three Washington-area couples I met taking lessons in tai chi were her clients. Their three-week tour took them eventually to Shangri-La in the mountain valleys of Yunnan Province bordering Tibet. They went from the plush comforts of Shanghai to the austere beauty of snowcapped mountains, Buddhist monasteries and no heat or indoor plumbing. They told me they felt as if they had gone from modern to medieval times, the reaction that Zhang cultivates to show old and new China.
So far, Zhang has been lucky that her competition is largely from the Chinese government. Most of the thousands of Chinese tour agencies that appear to be independent are owned by the government and focused on serving a mass market. They compete by offering the lowest prices. That means buses with fifty people or more traveling to the big-name sightseeing spots and eating at designated food halls where the cooks prepare food with bland foreign taste buds in mind. The tour guides have been schooled by the government and speak from the same memorized script. The goal is to offer the biggest tour at the lowest possible price. The profits won’t come from the trip itself but from tips and payoffs given by the souvenir shops and restaurants that are part of the tour. Even the government tour guides have to rely on tips.
A few years ago the American Political Science Association organized such a tour of China through a travel agency owned by the government. Michael Levy, who taught political science at Georgetown University, went on the trip along with his wife Bonny Wolf, a food writer. For Wolf, the trip was a nightmare. On her first visit to one of the great culinary countries of the world, she was starved for real Chinese food.
“Every day was planned to the minute,” she told me. “We could tell when we were stopping for lunch when we saw the parking lots filled with other buses. These tourist halls served horrible food. I remember the Great Wall for its horrible food. The Peking duck in Beijing wasn’t any different than the Peking duck I can eat in Arlington, Virginia.”
The low point was Shanghai. They were told they would dine at an American-style restaurant with a choice of eggplant parmesan or meatloaf. “That’s when I had enough and led a rebellion. I talked to everyone on the bus and we all agreed we had to go to a real Chinese restaurant.”
The guide said there would be no refund for their prepaid meal. More important, she said she needed permission from Beijing—a thought that seemed to make her nervous. For half a moment, Wolf said she worried: “Would the Chinese put us in jail because we went to a good restaurant?”
The guide relented—Beijing didn’t need to know—and the group went to a first-class restaurant where everyone was transfixed by the food. The much-feared bill cost $5 per person.
Zhang avoids tourist restaurants at all costs, quite literally. A tour of five or six cities that would cost $1,500 per person in a government agency tour package can cost around $4,850 through WildChina. While that is triple the government rate, it is reasonable for Americans and Europeans making a once-in-a-lifetime trip and expecting fine food, local flavor and experiences, and good hotels. This is the business principle undergirding WildChina, said Zhang: “We don’t do assembly-line travel.”
WildChina views the practices of government agencies as a template for what not to do. Government tour groups give a small base pay to guides and drivers in the expectation that they will earn much of their income from kickback payments from tourism restaurants, jade and porcelain factories and from tips from the tourists themselves.
“We don’t subscribe to that for multiple reasons. It’s not good for the guides, the drivers or the tourists,” said David Fundingsland of WildChina.
Instead, the agency selects and trains their own guides and drivers, whom they pay a high base salary: $90 a day for the guides in a country where the official average daily wage is $16. Moreover those salaries are supplemented with tips from clients and bonuses based on feedback from the clients. Kickbacks are not allowed. WildChina also has a “no-shopping” policy. Clients can shop if they want on their downtime without a guide. WildChina organizes meals at restaurants owned by locals, not chains. Local involvement extends to regular volunteer projects like building latrines and donating tents to the nomads of Yunnan Province.
“When the earthquake hit in Sichuan, we sent tents and equipment to the nomads we had trained to serve and work in camps and enjoy tourism. They had lost everything,” said Fundingsland.
Despite the higher costs, WildChina has those profit margins of 20 to 25 percent, far better than most Chinese government tour operations.
“Our institutional clients—like the Peabody Museum, the University of North Carolina—want us to do the coordination for their work and their pleasure, from the general to the thematic, and they trust us to provide the logistics for their meetings, equipment for trekking, as well as the side trips for their enjoyment,” he said.
Zhang knows American tastes. She is married to an American writer and journalist, and she lived in Los Angeles and Washington with her family of three children for more than five years. Now, as she ramps up her business, Zhang is attending high-end tourism conferences, speaking on panels and employing a public relations firm in the United States to get out the word and raise the profile of WildChina.
“If I have enough stickiness to the brand, people will come to our website,” she said.
But her steady focus is on securing rights to launch outbound tours for Chinese traveling overseas—the Holy Grail of the industry that Europeans, Americans, Australians, Arabs and Africans are all fighting for. One day Zhang lunched with the man she calls her “patron,” a major official in a government travel agency that acts as the umbrella for her agency. She will apply for an outbound license through his umbrella agency. “We’re required to have that state license to operate,” she said before running off to meet him, refusing to say his name.
Nellie Connolly, WildChina’s head of marketing, reviews what drives sales for WildChina on the Internet, word of mouth, awards from magazines like Condé Nast Traveler and the National Geographic, travel shows, Facebook, Twitter, and the WildChina blog. “We don’t buy advertisements,” she said. “We rely on travel writers.”
After reading those blogs and articles as well as the awards citations, I saw that while WildChina is challenging the government business model, it is staying very much within the political limits set by government officials. The extreme example is Tibet. WildChina has championed travel to Tibet, most recently describing it as a “bucket list destination” with not even a hint of the sporadic bloody protests there. In an email sent out in March 2012, WildChina told would-be clients, “There is something very special about visiting the birthplace of the Dalai Lama, witnessing monks in worship, soaking in the panoramic views of the Himalayas and having your first sip of yak butter tea. . . . ”
Six days earlier, two young Tibetan women had burned themselves in protest against Chinese rule. One year before, twenty-four Tibetans committed suicide as political protest. The situation was so tense in 2008 and early 2009 that China banned foreigners, including tourists, from visiting Tibet, canceling all foreign tours. The Chinese are trying to maneuver around the politics and hold on to the tourism that makes up 20 percent of the economy. The government built a road to the village where the fourteenth Dalai Lama was born but forbids tourists from entering the house where he lived. To this day, it is a crime to own a picture of the Dalai Lama.
In the Chinese tourism game there is no other choice but to stay within the bright lines of political correctness drawn by the government. On my last night in Beijing, Zhang invited me to her home, where I met her three lively children. Her husband was away on work. There is nothing extravagant about her lifestyle save the car and driver required to navigate Beijing traffic. When we started discussing Zhang’s future plans, her youngest daughter said, “Mommy likes to travel but she loves to be with us more.”
We delayed the conversation until Zhang walked me to a cab. “Wild-China is privately held and now it is comfortable for me, a small cash cow. But the dream is too small. If outbound takes off, then I could combine the two and be ready to take it public and to grow. I’ll need some pretty big growth to break through. That’s what I’m working on.”
That description of her goals paralleled my last interview with Albar. Marriott, he said, was building its brand in China and through China. “We require a thirty-year, iron-clad contract for every hotel we manage here with the highest standards—far stricter than the Chinese standards. We turn down more opportunities than we accept. We can’t get it wrong in China—this is the new world.”
• • •
After my stay in Beijing, I joined my husband Bill in Shanghai, where we began our travel through China as tourists. There is a fierce modern-day rivalry between Shanghai and Beijing in most spheres. Shanghai plays the role of New York City—the economic hub of the country, a trading giant that faces the sea, and the biggest city, one with swagger and attitude. If the comparison were a direct parallel, Beijing would be Washington, D.C., the staid, single-minded capital of the United States. But Beijing has more of the feel of Berlin, with its heavy history and its search for a modern identity as the newly emerged power center of the Asian continent.
The Chinese government challenged both cities to land the Big Event that could transform their appeal and reputation and attract more foreign visitors. Beijing won its bid for the Summer Olympics in 2008. And Shanghai was selected as the host for the World Expo in 2010, becoming the first city in a developing nation to host the Expo since the tradition began in London in 1851.
Top Chinese officials decided which city would be the candidate for each of these events and aggressively promoted them. Shanghai, the economic engine of China, was the logical choice to vie for the World Expo, which is known as the Economic Olympics in tourism circles. Staging those two events within two years was a major statement of China’s intent to enter the top tier of cosmopolitan nations. The Shanghai Expo cost $55 billion, excluding the new infrastructure, more than the $40 billion spent on the Beijing Summer Olympics.
Wu Yi, the head of China’s commission for bidding on these events, made the case that “more and more tourists come to China for its time-honored, splendid culture, and more and more foreigners become friends of China for its honest, warm-hearted people.”
Like Beijing, Shanghai razed a huge swath of the city to clear over 1,200 acres of land on either side of the Huangpu River that divides the city. Then Shanghai spent $45 billion to add seven new subway lines to its city system to move crowds to the Expo grounds, more than doubling its reach, and to improve or construct major highways and other infrastructure around the area. For its landmark, the World Expo 2010 Shanghai built a massive red-lacquer Chinese Pavilion with a roof built using traditional fretwork brackets. The pavilion hosted extravagant spectacles of Chinese dancers and acrobats in colorful costumes—the same entertainment that wowed foreigners at the Beijing Olympics.
Some 246 countries, cities, companies and organizations took part in the Expo, either building full-blown pavilions or staging exhibits. By the time it closed down in October, at least 73 million visitors had walked through the grounds. Those numbers set a record for all expos; the vast majority of visitors were Chinese, many of them residents of Shanghai, who were eligible for free tickets.
The foreign pavilions at the Expo were high-class tourism advertisements to entice the Chinese to visit India, Germany or Botswana. The Denmark Pavilion was a crowd favorite. The Danish had sent its statue of the Little Mermaid on its first trip overseas to grace its pavilion, drawing nearly 6 million Chinese, more than the actual population of Denmark.
The second stage in the transformation of Shanghai into the top tourist spot began in 2011 with the construction of China’s first Disneyland in the city’s suburbs. As the largest tourism joint project with a foreign company, the new Disneyland is intended to make Shanghai a “world-class tourist destination,” just as Disneyland Paris has become the single most visited attraction in France.
The first phase of the resort will cover nearly 1,000 acres and eventually cost more than the Expo. The resort will be roughly equidistant between Shanghai city and its international airport; 300 million people live within a two-hour drive of the site. Once the entire complex is built, the developers hope attendance will surpass the 45 million annual visitors to Disney World in Orlando. A resort of this size means tens of thousands of new jobs—and newcomers—for Shanghai, a prospect that helped convince the Chinese government to sign on to the deal after a fifteen-year courtship by Disney. While we were in the city, the Disneyland construction site was off-limits, but newspapers were filled with reports of the new subway link under construction and the renderings of the design that would be familiar to anyone who has visited Disney World in Orlando or Disneyland in California.
Bill and I stayed within the traditional tourist zones in Shanghai, at a hotel in the old French Concession in strolling distance of the Bund. On this trip we booked only hotels that were Chinese-owned and -operated, avoiding international chains. That proved more difficult than we had imagined. Albar was right when he said that over 90 percent of hotels in China were now managed by chains. Shanghai, though, is blessed with beautiful Art Deco buildings that have been preserved as hotels. Some believe they escaped the wrecking ball because they are western-styled, erected by Europeans and wealthy Chinese in the 1930s.
This was the era when Shanghai gained its reputation as the Paris of Asia. The blend of western architecture with Chinese sensibilities is the backdrop to all of those smoky images of Shanghai bankers and mobsters, traders in tea shops and women wearing the satin Mandarin dresses, or cheongsam. Dozens of these beautiful buildings still line the Bund, the stretch along the Huangpu River, which divides the city and empties into the Pacific Ocean. (It was christened the Bund by English entrepreneurs using the Hindi word for “levee” or “dam.”)
We stayed at a mansion-hotel, the Heng-Shan Moller Villa, a fantastic confection of Swedish and Chinese architecture built in 1936 by Eric Moller, a Swedish shipping magnate. The Moller family gave up the home in 1950 after China became Communist. It served as the headquarters of the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Communist Party Youth League throughout the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, keeping intact the impressive stained-glass windows, staircases and paneled foyer. In 2001, the government gave it to the Heng-Shan Group of Shanghai, which refurbished and restored it as a hotel. Although the group added some questionable outbuildings to the garden, its eccentric Euro-Chinese décor was preserved, along with the large garden, an unheard-of luxury in downtown Shanghai, where millions of cars clog the streets and fill the nights with honking horns. We listened to birdsongs from our open windows every morning.
It was a brisk walk to the Bund, which is now the sine qua non of Shanghai tourism. The riverside quay has been transformed into an expansive modern promenade where Shanghai families come on the weekends and buy their children toys and snacks while tourists climb onto sightseeing boats to view the city. Across the boulevard stand those Art Deco buildings that have won preservation status as classic masterpieces.
To understand why the Art Deco buildings were preserved while the far older Chinese masterpieces of Beijing were razed, as well as other puzzles of modern Chinese tourism, we met William Patrick Cranley and his wife Tina Kanagaratnam, two of the founders of Historic Shanghai. They were our hosts for Sunday brunch at M on the Bund, the literary watering hole of Shanghai at the top of the old 1921 Nissan Shipping Building, now restored.
It was a bright, windy day along the river. Cranley and Kanagaratnam had moved to Shanghai fourteen years earlier and said they quickly became enamored with the city, especially the Art Deco buildings from the 1930s. In their downtime—he is an academic, she is in public relations—they became tour guides for visiting foreigners, requiring them to dig deep into the city’s history and discover the Byzantine ways of the country’s tourism industry.
“The first visitors were often people with family ties to old Shanghai—from the foreign concessions, Jewish families, Chinese families, French, American, British,” said Cranley.
“Some came with only one photo and said, ‘this is my house, please help me find it,’ ” said Kanagaratnam. To her surprise, she did find a house or two.
Now Cranley operates several basic tours for private groups or tour companies, often customizing them. His Art Deco walking tour takes visitors to the jewels along the Bund—the Fairmont Peace Hotel, the Park Hotel, the Bank of China Building—and then down the narrow lilongs of the city to see one of the greatest collections of Art Deco buildings in the world. Another popular walking tour covers what is left of Shanghai’s once-thriving Jewish quarter. This is not to be confused with the official Chinese tour agency’s “Jewish Historic Tour,” which is a standard two-week trip through China with an afternoon stop at the old Jewish quarter of Zhengszhou and one day looking at Jewish sites in Shanghai.
Cranley’s tours, though, are basically illegal.
“Tourism is a state-protected business in China. Those of us foreigners who give tours are technically illegal. We’re not licensed. So that means we can’t register as a business or open a bank account under our name Historic Shanghai,” said Cranley. “So we don’t make waves and we operate below the radar.”
That doesn’t mean that the authorities are ignorant. They tolerate the tours because they bring in business, often high-end tourism. For ten years Cranley and Kanagaratnam and their partner Tess Johnston, the doyenne of Historic Shanghai, have been sponsoring the Shanghai Literary Festival, which is publicized in the media. The target audience is English-speakers, which gives them the breathing space. The festival headlines some Chinese authors like Qiu Xialolong, the author of a popular English-language detective series set in his native Shanghai. Cranley said they sold 7,000 tickets to the festival in 2011, largely to locals but also to people who came from Beijing and Singapore: “They’re all English-speakers but it is hard to tell if our audience is overseas Chinese or local Chinese.”
Historic China’s other goal is to save historic buildings from being demolished, an increasingly difficult proposition since those buildings sit on very valuable land. This is the axis where the needs of tourism run smack-dab into the logic of Chinese development. The quickest way to make money in China is to tear down a building—historic or not—then sell the increasingly valuable land and build something else. The argument that those buildings are an essential core to the tourism trade is often ignored by the powerful interests tied to the government. With so much at stake behind the scenes, Cranley said it is sometimes better that foreigners like him lead the campaign rather than Chinese.
“That’s our challenge. We can’t really lobby, and all preservation is done by the state, so we have to operate through the media or with Twitter campaigns to prevent another building from being torn down on the Bund,” said Cranley. With that aim in mind, he and his partners are sponsoring the World Congress on Art Deco in 2015 to spotlight and preserve what is left of Art Deco buildings in Shanghai. It is a gamble to convince the government there is room in Shanghai for the historic Bund as well as Disneyland.
All of this maneuvering has been done against the backdrop of the rapid buildup of tourism that exploded in 2000 when domestic tourism was unleashed and foreigners discovered China’s strength, especially after the Asian financial crisis.
The Golden Weeks announcement of guaranteed vacation “put it all together,” said Cranley. “Now we have to deal with our success. We’re all experimenting to find the sweet spot where tourism is working for China and where Chinese tourists feel they are free as tourists.”
Bill and I met many of those Chinese tourists at the site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, when the party was officially founded, a critical milestone on the road to revolution. The house in the French Concession is an essential stop on the “Red Tourism Highway.” The crowd entered the stone home with a degree of respect I hadn’t seen before in China. Inside, visitors stood quietly before a tableau of mannequins representing the initial thirteen delegates with Mao Zedong at the head, a gathering of modern China’s founding fathers.
It is one of the premier sites along the “Red Tourism Highway” that began six years earlier to recognize China’s Communist traditions and to make tourism “more consistent with the times and reality.” Six billion Chinese have visited one of those sites, accounting for roughly 20 percent of domestic tourism, generating millions of dollars and creating nearly 1 million jobs.
On our last day we met a native of Shanghai whom I will call Pan. She is fourth-generation Shanghai, the great-granddaughter of one of the first Chinese Methodist ministers. Her family once owned a comfortable home near the Bund but lost it after the Chinese revolution. When private property was restored, they were not given back their home. We ate at one of her favorite new restaurants, where she chose a feast for us of spicy river fish and dumplings with sweet bean curds from a menu the size of a small cookbook.
As she described her young life—graduation with honors from a Chinese university, study abroad in Great Britain and then home to Shanghai, where she teaches English—Pan said the city had lost its unique flavor and that she is wary of the surge in tourism and the Chinese workers attracted from the countryside.
“None of these people you see on the street are from Shanghai. It doesn’t matter anymore if you are fourth-generation Shanghai like I am or well educated. Shanghai now belongs to outsiders.”
Initially, I wanted to travel on one of China’s new fast trains for a segment of our trip, but a series of fatal accidents frightened me. The government has invested billions of dollars in new high-speed rail links, the longest one between Beijing and Shanghai. These bullet trains will eventually connect major cities around the country, a commendable attempt to reduce carbon emissions by offering an alternative to airplanes and cars. It was a huge leap from China’s earlier rail system, built more than a hundred years ago to carry freight around the vast country.
But the Chinese rushed the construction of the system, ignoring complaints from foreign and Chinese experts about safety issues. Then in July 2011, a few months before our trip, a new Chinese fast train had a spectacular collision with another train that killed 39 people. By comparison, Japan’s high-speed rail has been operating since 1964 and has never had a fatality. Eventually, China will repair the damage done by taking shortcuts but I wasn’t prepared to take a chance. We stuck to airplanes.
We flew to Xian, an old imperial capital of little modern significance until 1974, when some farmers hit a strange object while digging a well. They alerted the local government, and soon the world knew that they had discovered one of the great archeological treasures of China—an army of terra-cotta soldiers, horses and chariots buried in a necropolis, not unlike an Egyptian pyramid, to accompany an emperor after his death. Xian was Bill’s focus on the trip. A retired army officer, he was enthralled with the idea of seeing a replica of a third century B.C. Chinese army.
On landing we were once again struck by the enormity of China. The air terminal of Xian was larger than Dulles, our home airport in Washington, D.C., yet it was too small for the city of 9 million. A second terminal was under construction.
Waiting for us was a middle-aged Chinese woman who introduced herself as “Linda.” With her pleasant, no-nonsense manner, her hair barely combed and her clothes thrown together, she gave the impression of an intellectual who was badly cast as a tour guide. A travel agent back home had organized this part of our trip, following proper procedure by using a Chinese government tour group to book our hotel, guide and car. We asked “Linda” what her real name was. “Lin Xi,” she answered, adding that all the guides are required to use foreign names with tourists. “Chinese names are difficult,” she said.
She smiled and said we would have to wait. Our car and driver had been reassigned and our substitute car was caught in traffic. Twenty minutes later a vintage Red Flag automobile pulled up. We climbed inside the trash-strewn backseat, which smelled of years of chain-smoking drivers.
Undeterred, Lin Xi got into the front seat, and as we drove into town, she announced that she would tell us her life story. Born to a farmer father and teacher mother in 1966, Lin Xi said she remembered hearing people shouting, “Long Live Chairman Mao, the Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China.”
“They didn’t care about their lives, only about politics,” she said. “We were told that the Americans were imperialists and that Europeans were the running dog of the American imperialists. We prepared for war with you—can you imagine? Now I am your tour guide.”
She was bitter that her education was so bad that “we were not expected to have academic excellence, only political excellence.” And she was bitter about the lies she was told. “We did not know the outside world. We felt we were in heaven because we had a watch, a sewing machine and a bicycle. We were told others didn’t have as much as we did.”
She said that when Chairman Mao died in 1976, “the Great Man Deng Xiaoping opened us to the outside world. Before, we had been told we were the best in the world, and we learned that was wrong, that three-fourths of the world lived better than we did.”
Her life improved as the economy grew at 10 percent a year. Then, she said, it was almost destroyed by the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. “At first, I supported the students and sent them money. Then I realized that the students lived in an ivory tower. If they had won, China would have collapsed and the world would have had to feed us.”
She nodded her head to signal the end. “Just now I have told you how China’s changes have changed my life in my lifetime.”
Bill and I had the feeling that not only was this Lin Xi’s standard script delivered for every tourist who traveled with her but that it had been approved by her political superiors at the China Youth Travel Service, the government bureau where she worked. Her “personal story” didn’t waver from the Communist Party line that condemned the radical policies of Mao Zedong without criticizing him and that cast Deng as the modern savior. It even included a confession by Lin Xi and an acknowledgment of her mistakes.
This turned out to be only the first chapter of her “personal story,” which she continued to deliver at appropriate moments during our three days together, each episode emphasizing the positive economic and political improvements of the New China, each revolving around her discovering of the wisdom of the government.
We arrived at the Tang Paradise Hotel. Bill and I were pleased that we had insisted on a Chinese-only hotel policy. The hotel had the multilayered roof of a mythical Chinese palace. Inside, the white walls were accented with red lacquer and black fretwork. I asked Lin Xi the age of the hotel, wondering whether it was built in the nineteenth or twentieth century. “It was built in 2005,” she said. “This is a history park, not real history.”
The hotel sits at the far end of a 165-acre theme park with extensive gardens and lakes built to tell the glories of the Tang Dynasty, one of the more sophisticated in Chinese history—encouraging the arts, refining the civil service examination and allotting farmland on a relatively equal basis. The history park focused on grand replicas of temples, pavilions and miniature palaces, all supposedly built in the Tang style. Admission to the park is $14; those staying in the hotel enter for free. It was a signal example of the tourism industry’s promotion of replicas over actual historic buildings, a Chinese take on the Disneyland model.
The next day we were off to the Terra-Cotta Army of Xian, speeding along an eight-lane expressway. Lin Xi recited the history of Qin Shi Huang Di, China’s first emperor, and how he ordered the construction of this army to accompany him to heaven. “He strongly believed in the afterlife and kept his tomb very secret. He had three thousand concubines. He made his tomb like his life. Two hundred concubines were buried alive with him and the terra-cotta soldiers.”
We pulled off the main highway and drove past parking lots the size of an American football field; most were half-full of tour buses. This was the intersection of domestic and foreign travel writ large. The Chinese government had built the parking lots and an outdoor market of souvenir stores lining the wide path to the terra-cotta pits for the 2 million people who come each year. We smiled at the hawkers selling miniature statues, sheepskin rugs and nuts wrapped in a cone.
In front of the museum built at the entry of the first pit, Bill turned to Lin Xi and explained that he was a retired U.S. Army officer and had been looking forward to seeing the terra-cotta soldiers for years. He told her he wanted to study the statues for their “tactical formation and the integration of combined arms.” She smiled and walked us through.
This first emperor of Qin, or China, unified much of the country in 221 B.C. with extraordinary military aplomb. The pits holding his eternal army held clues to how he won battle after battle. Clay soldiers are lined up in trenches, each with individual faces and positioned according to rank. Bill explained to me how one could read the sophistication of the army by the arrangements in battle formations that clearly showed the tactics of the day. Foot soldiers were followed by cavalry and then charioteers—these were pulled by clay horses lined up four abreast. Bill paced the perimeter of each of the three pits, marveling at the details, pointing out the flank security on both sides and taking photograph after photograph so he could study the soldiers at leisure when we got home.
Lin Xi was growing impatient. She drew alongside me and said it was time to leave. We would be late for lunch. “Could you please ask your husband to follow me?”
I walked over and told Bill our time was up. He went over to Lin Xi and told her in the gentlest terms that he would happily skip whatever else she had planned so he could spend more time with these clay ghosts. She laughed: “You are breaking the record of the Australian man who spent two hours here!”
Bill and Lin Xi reached a compromise, and one hour later we strolled out of the pit and arrived for the last seating at an auditorium-size dining hall. Lin Xi showed us to a table, pointed to the buffet lines in an adjoining room and disappeared. The food was neither good nor bad, neither Asian nor Western. After the meal we left Xian’s Terra-Cotta Army, walking past the phalanx of souvenir stalls, and climbed into our car.
My eyes were burning. I rubbed them until I could open them again and looked outside. The leaden sky had been blocking the sun since we arrived. I asked Lin Xi when it was going to rain and rinse away the heavy, foul-smelling air. “The pollution is pretty bad here,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “This is mist. Xian has always had yellow mist. We say that dogs bark at the sun, not the moon. Seeing the sun is rare. You can call this fog, if you like.”
I started to challenge her when Bill gently touched my arm and put a silencing finger to his lips. Lin Xi had her playbook that required all good tour guides to deny the country’s abysmal pollution.
We had been lucky until Xian. It rained most of the time I was in Beijing, and during our long weekend in Shanghai a strong wind off the river swept much of the filth away from the city. But now we were in the interior of China, in a city ringed with factories, caught inside the pollution that blankets much of the country.
After seeing the soldiers we drove back into the city, past block after block of twenty-story look-alike concrete apartment buildings, all obscured in the soupy atmosphere. We had arrived at our next destination—the magnificent, brooding city walls of Xian, the longest left standing in the country. “The walls date from the Ming Dynasty and stretch eight miles,” said Lin Xi. “It took eighteen years to dig the moat and build the walls.”
At the top of the walls Lin Xi suggested we bicycle around the top of them. I started coughing, and coughing, and then sneezing. The air was impossible. I was reminded of the series of stories preceding the 2008 Beijing Olympics of athletes questioning whether they would compete in air that could harm their lungs. The marathon world record holder, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, dropped out of that event rather than compete in China’s polluted air. Their complaints forced the Chinese government to make rare admissions that air pollution is a public health problem; to improve air quality for the Summer Olympics, the government ordered the temporary suspension of factories surrounding the city and instituted a policy to stagger the use of automobiles in the capital—a policy that has remained in force. After the Olympics the government reverted to their old habit of denying the true dimensions of the problem publicly, while in private taking extraordinary precautions for their own health, purifying the air in their own homes and offices with expensive filters.
Some tourists can be fooled by the stories of fog and mist from their tour guides; others become ill during their trips and post warnings on websites like VirtualTourist that caution tourists to wear face masks or avoid China during certain seasons. The heavy smog disrupts air traffic and creates serious traffic jams—all part of a tourist’s experience of the country. The official China National Tourist Office avoids the subject altogether; its photographs show nothing but clear blue skies over Beijing, Shanghai and points west.
While we were in China, the official newspaper, China Daily, reported that more than half of China’s wealthiest people—those with assets over $9 million—said they planned to immigrate to a wealthy, cleaner nation like Australia or the United States for the sake of their children and a better standard of living. The government denies the extent of pollution not only to tourists but to its own people. Last year residents of Beijing fed up with the lies told by their government turned to the U.S. embassy and its accurate reports on the air index to decide whether they should hazard the smog that day. By denying that pollution even exists, the Chinese tourism industry is making matters worse for itself and for the tourists. At the end of our trip pollution was my biggest complaint.
Lin Xi suggested that we attend a dinner-theater presentation at the Shaanxi Grand Opera House. “This is a famous Chinese cultural event. Dinner is four cold plates, then four plates of hot dumplings, tea and hot rice wine,” she said. “Then the theater of Tang Dynasty music and dance, the peak of Chinese culture.”
Bill said he was game. Lin Xi said she would buy our tickets; each would cost 320 yuan, the less formal name for renminbi. She put out her hand. Bill pulled out his wallet, counted his money and shook his head. He didn’t have enough cash to buy the tickets. He could use his credit card when we got there. Without skipping a beat, Lin Xi ordered the driver to make a series of turns and—violà—we were in front of a bank ATM machine. Bill climbed out with Lin Xi right behind him. She squeezed into the glass-enclosed booth, and when the paper money slid out of the machine she blocked Bill’s exit until he handed over 640 yuan. Then she smiled.
There was no doubt that we had just witnessed how Lin Xi makes her money. She needed the cash to buy the tickets herself and get her cut. If we had used our credit cards, she would lose that cut and a good share of what she expected to earn that week.
The parking lot in front of the Opera was crowded with tour buses. Lin Xi escorted us inside to a table in a large, multitiered hall facing the stage. She introduced us to our waitress and then wished us a pleasant night. Looking around at the mix of foreign and Chinese tourists, Bill announced, “This is a Chinese version of a Las Vegas supper club.”
The curtain rose. The bright pastel costumes were Chinese; the women’s dresses were form-fitting and showed ample midriff; their dark hair was crowned with elaborate combs. The music had a hint of American show tunes. A heavily madeup man dressed as a Tang emperor was the emcee. The curtain rose and fell on a dozen different songs, from springtime cherry blossoms to a moonlit rendezvous. A Chinese version of a dance of seven veils was followed by a bird chirping. It was hard to believe that the show was a presentation of the arts as “passed down from the Tang Dynasty,” as the emperor-host had promised.
We followed the crowd out to our car while most of the theatergoers climbed onto their buses. And we checked the price of the ticket: 198 yuan a person. That meant Lin Xi pocketed 244 yuan. We didn’t say a word.
The next day we flew to Chengdu, celebrated as the home of the panda.
• • •
A French Catholic missionary named Armand David is responsible for transforming an elusive, humble bear into China’s most beloved creature. The Chinese paid little attention to the black and white panda until David brought a specimen back to Paris in the late nineteenth century and declared he had discovered a new species of bear. Westerners were fascinated by the panda, while the Chinese largely ignored it. That changed during the first decades of the People’s Republic of China when the government latched on to the panda as a fitting symbol of modern China that was free of the baggage of its imperial past. (The panda was rarely if ever portrayed in classical Chinese art.) Soon the panda was featured on postage stamps, as the mascot of new industries and as a popular toy. As the Chinese opened up to the world and were maneuvering through the intricacies of Cold War diplomacy, the panda proved an irresistible way to woo nations. Pandas given by China became the superstars of zoos in the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States.
As Panda popularity skyrocketed, alarm set in when the Chinese realized that their precious panda was an endangered species. Their habitat had been eaten away by logging and industrialization. The Chinese turned to the World Wildlife Fund, beginning a collaboration that is immortalized in the panda logo of the WWF. The small Wanglang reserve and the massive Wolong reserve of 494,000 acres were established as the giant panda’s home in Sichuan Province. The pandas became a national treasure and the penalty for killing one is the death sentence.
Once Deng set his sights on building China’s tourism industry, it was natural to make the panda one of the country’s biggest draws. The Chinese were the first to fall headlong in love with panda tourism. Once domestic travel opened up, the panda reserves and base camps were overrun with Chinese tourists. In the twenty-first century, with foreigners arriving in droves, panda tourism grew fivefold. It is now one of the biggest money-makers for Chengdu.
The power of the panda cult was demonstrated after the great 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province. At least 70,000 people were killed in that disaster; many were children buried alive in shoddily built schools. Grieving parents bitterly protested publicly about the corrupt contractors who cut corners building the schools in order to increase their profits. Yet the government failed to fully investigate and, instead, punished the activists demanding an accounting.
By way of comparison, the government and conservationists moved swiftly to save pandas from the rubble of the enormous earthquake. In a video called Out of the Rock Comes Life, the pandas caught in the earthquake are shown being transferred to new temporary homes, where two cubs named Ping-Ping and An-An are born, grow up, play with the workers and are then returned to their homes in the wilder reserves. Four months after the earthquake panda tourism was back at near-peak numbers in the least-affected areas. And on the first-year anniversary of the quake, the province handed out to tourists $1.9 million of special “panda cards” for discounts and free entry to attractions.
Conservationists have been equally adroit at using the panda in their Sisyphean struggle to protect and expand China’s wild habitat. In the name of saving the endangered panda, Chinese conservationists have convinced the government to set aside hundreds of thousands of acres of land, closing them off to logging and development to make safe homes for monkeys, wild goats like the golden Takin goat-antelope and thousands of bird species. They reverted back to their wilderness state in the mountainous regions of Sichuan, even in areas that had been heavily logged. In a few years clean water was running through the valleys, flowering plants and shrubs grew back, and the air was fresh. The forests began to resemble the exotic woods described by Marco Polo centuries ago with their golden pheasants. Part of the unspoken bargain for creating and keeping these reserves was opening up areas for tourism.
Just before I left Beijing to join Bill in Shanghai, I attended a panda photo exhibit with Zhang Mei. Her WildChina company has several tours into panda reserves and contributes to their preservation—part of her sustainable-tourism program. Xiang Ding Qian, a park ranger at the Changqing Nature Reserve in Shaanxi, spent seven years taking color photographs of the wild, shy bears, capturing them swinging through trees in the snow and waddling through bamboo forests in the summer. A visit to the Chengdu panda reserve has become an essential part of most foreigners’ tours of China.
Nana was our tour guide in Chengdu. A moon-faced young woman in her early twenties living with her mother, Nana said she had no interest in politics. She loves movies and considers Denzel Washington the world’s best actor. She said she loved fashion and wore a pink leatherlike jacket with form-fitting gray pants and an organza gray scarf with pink polka dots. She had no real memory of Deng Xiaoping and knew little of the Cultural Revolution. She was the exact opposite of Lin Xi.
Yet Nana, too, introduced herself to us by telling us her life story, which took no time at all. Then she went straight to a business proposition. “You are going to the Panda Reserve tomorrow. For one hundred seventy dollars you can hold a baby panda. Cash only in American dollars, no Chinese yuan, no credit cards.”
After our night at the opera it was easy to pass on this offer. Nana tried again, saying how happy people were to hold the panda babies. We still declined. That night, when we asked to eat at an authentic local Sichuan restaurant, she found us a great one nearby and then walked there with us to insure we ordered correctly.
The next day as we crawled through the thick traffic of Chengdu—a city of 14 million people in one of the more industrialized areas of central China—Nana said she had studied two years at a government tourism school and passed the government exam, which is largely based on memorization: what to tell the tourists about the history of the region, the customs, the sayings and the areas of cultural interest.
She told us what they were instructed to say about the people of Chengdu: “We are like the pandas—we enjoy life and we are lazy and we like to eat. We like to go to teahouses and sit and talk all day.”
Then she told us she had a new offer for our panda visit that morning. We could now pay in Chinese yuan and with new, lower prices: 500 yuan to clean a panda cage and 1,000 yuan to hold a Panda baby. We said no again.
The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding resembles Central Park given over to pandas. The walkways through the forest are lined with open-air enclosures for panda teenagers rolling around gnawing on bamboo like it was sugarcane; for adult pandas sitting like Buddhas in the thicket, their backs turned to the humans yelling at them; and the Moonlit Nursery House, enclosed pens where dozens of miniature-size baby pandas were sleeping in giant cribs, some in the arms of humans willing to pay $170 to cuddle them.
It was remarkable to see pandas climbing on gymnastic equipment made to look like a forest; pandas swinging on old tires; pandas hugging the legs of their keepers; pandas wrestling each other in one big ball of black and white fur. Yes, the air was as polluted as it had been in Xian. And the crowds grew throughout the morning until everyone was jostling at the low fence to get the best snapshots. Everyone seemed happy to be in such a predicament. Who knows if it is tourist propaganda, but pandas do make people smile.
This panda reserve in the Chengdu suburbs is just the first stop for a true panda aficionado. A popular two-week panda tour includes visits to the Wolong Reserve, the Wanglang Reserve and a valley even farther north near Tibet, with treks in the wilderness as well as enclosed panda viewings. Instead, we opted for the Buddhist tourism trail, beginning with our stay in the Buddha Zen Hotel in Chengdu’s historic district.
Set in a side street near the 1,000-year-old Wenshuyuan Buddhist Temple, the hotel had the smell of a 1930s Chinese melodrama, with small rooms portioned off by sliding doors. A Buddha statue adorned with flowers sits in the entry, perfumed by burning incense sticks. An inner courtyard with a small Zen garden muffled the city noise. There wasn’t a single European-style stuffed chair in sight—only comfortable Asian wooden chairs and stools around tables. A group of young cartoonists from Malaysia were standing around a large tablet left in the lobby for calligraphy, laughing. They were taking turns dipping the brushes into an ink stone to draw silly portraits of each other.
Our room had a balcony overlooking a quiet side street. The neighborhood was a mixture of new shops in old storefronts and colonial-era clubs and homes with gardens hidden behind an old walled community. The Wenshuyuan Buddhist Temple complex had been returned to a house of worship, with Buddhist faithful wearing designer jeans praying and consulting with monks draped in deep scarlet robes.
I asked the concierge whether our hotel dated from the 1920s or the 1930s. Her answer was “It was built five years ago.”
“This is a new hotel?” I asked, clearly disappointed. She answered, yes, but it was built according to the old traditions. By this time, I wasn’t sure that it mattered. Finding a reasonable facsimile of an old-style Chinese inn—not a grandiose theme park version of a Tang palace—was enough for me. The promises and the deep paradox of tourism in China that advertises itself as one of the world’s oldest civilizations was captured in this country’s impulse to tear down its old buildings and replace a few of them with replicas.
It rained the next day, clean sheets of rain for the entire two-hour drive to the Leshan Giant Buddha. We passed long stretches of rice paddies with stucco farm homes built around courtyards, interrupted by another stretch of factories sending billowing smoke in the air. Then another stretch of green rice fields, tethered goats, fish ponds and white herons flying overhead until a series of large billboard advertisements blocked the view. We arrived at the city of Leshan and made our way to the river.
Registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Buddha was carved into a rock cliff along the river sometime in the eighth century. Now a major tourist site, the government has spent over $5 million to repair the Buddha and its surroundings. We were in a group of Chinese tourists and hopped on a government motorboat tour. As the boat pulled out, Bill and I stayed on deck. Within five minutes the truly giant Buddha came in view; it is described as the largest in the world. The Buddha was carved sitting as if on a chair—not in the traditional lotus position—giving him a stiff appearance that matched his height of 233 feet. The boat sputtered past him and then turned around, idling directly in front of the statue. The young women hostesses announced on the loudspeaker that for a fee they would take special photographs of the passengers. Many did line up to be photographed looking as if they were praying to Lord Buddha. Then we were driven back to the quay. The tour lasted exactly thirty minutes. Bill said that the trip was “a long run for a short slide.”
It was also another example of how the UNESCO heritage brand can so easily become a kiss of death, transforming a cultural landmark into a tourist trap. Good for tourism business, not for the monument.
• • •
When Bill and I were flying home to Washington—a fourteen-hour journey—I realized that no other country has affected me like China. It is hard to fathom how much of the future of the world’s tourism industry is in the hands of the Chinese. With its pastiche of official top-down control over tourism, its nascent bottom-up entrepreneurship, the built-in corruption and mandatory propaganda lessons, China is hardly a model for a business that protects and enhances locations and provides a steady, aboveboard profit.
Part of the short-term logic behind the model is the sheer number of tourists coming and going to China; especially since the government has given “Golden Weeks” of paid vacation to its population of 1.37 billion and a directive to them to see the world. The other foundation is China’s basic economic model. The Chinese penchant for tearing down the old to be replaced by “anywhere” architecture or ersatz “olde China” fuels growth in that system, but it also diminishes the country’s long-term appeal to tourists.
Then there is the pollution. It is a health problem and a symptom of the wide environmental damage wrought by China’s industrialization. Tourism can’t be neutral in the face of the polluted air, water and landscape that Deng had predicted; while Marriott and WildChina have offset programs, they are symbolic of what needs to be done rather than a solution. The speed and size of tourism’s growth makes it difficult to imagine how the industry will reduce rather than exacerbate the problems. While tourism officials argue that in the new world, everyone has a right to travel, China presents you with a vivid picture of what happens if that travel isn’t well managed with the future in mind.
The Chinese government’s tourism policy has succeeded in several ways. Tourism has helped spread the image of China as a new, modern nation. Compared to the draconian image of Communist days, China appears open to tourists who speak no Chinese and have three weeks at best to traverse this continent-size nation. They don’t notice the plainclothes policemen patrolling Tiananmen Square for potential dissidents or understand the tight political and cultural censorship. They do not use the Chinese Internet and have no idea of the severe censorship that blocks entire websites with anything critical of China—all in the name of “harmony.” Nor do they see routine police arrests, without warrants, of dissidents and protesters . . . the list is long.
And the Chinese government has realized its other goal during this long period of experimentation and is making handsome profits, as Deng also predicted, but those are difficult to trace.
The stakes are equally high for foreign countries that are counting on the Chinese tourists to improve their business futures by traveling abroad in great numbers and spending equally large sums of money. As Jonathan Tourtellot of National Geographic said, “If the Chinese get it right—if they figure out the right balance—then tourism is great. If the Chinese get it wrong, we’re all cooked.”