GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 218

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 visit-
ing 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 consolid-
ated 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. Say-
ing 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,