GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 220

ers, guides, service staff and management teams. “There should be programs to train tour-
ism 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 agen-
cies. 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 confer-
ence. 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 com-
munes. 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 foreign-
ers: 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