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owned by the government and focused on serving a mass market. They compete by offer-
ing 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 polit-
ical 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 culin-
ary 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 stop-
ping 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 res-
taurant 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, loc-
al 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 restaur-
ants, jade and porcelain factories and from tips from the tourists themselves.
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