GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 222

“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 ex-
perience 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 tour-
ists 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 au-
tumn.
To tie it all together, the government named these vacations “Golden Weeks.” Now en-
shrined 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 out-
fits, 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 al-
lowed “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