GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 211

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GOLDEN WEEKS
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 fre-
quent 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 en-
hancements that would become a money machine.
In the 1980s, when the opening began, China's image was utterly unfit for a tourist cam-
paign. 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 revolu-
tion 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 under-
line 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 thou-
sands in Tiananmen Square waving Mao's Little Red Book. All those decades of revolution