THE CHINESE MARKET - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 238

largely to locals but also to people who came from Beijing and Singapore: “They're all
English-speakers but it is hard to tell if our audience is overseas Chinese or local Chinese.”
Historic China's other goal is to save historic buildings from being demolished, an
increasingly difficult proposition since those buildings sit on very valuable land. This is
the axis where the needs of tourism run smack-dab into the logic of Chinese develop-
ment. The quickest way to make money in China is to tear down a building—historic or
not—then sell the increasingly valuable land and build something else. The argument
that those buildings are an essential core to the tourism trade is often ignored by the power-
ful interests tied to the government. With so much at stake behind the scenes, Cranley
said it is sometimes better that foreigners like him lead the campaign rather than Chinese.
“That's our challenge. We can't really lobby, and all preservation is done by the state, so
we have to operate through the media or with Twitter campaigns to prevent another build-
ing from being torn down on the Bund,” said Cranley. With that aim in mind, he and his
partners are sponsoring the World Congress on Art Deco in 2015 to spotlight and preserve
what is left of Art Deco buildings in Shanghai. It is a gamble to convince the government
there is room in Shanghai for the historic Bund as well as Disneyland.
All of this maneuvering has been done against the backdrop of the rapid buildup of
tourism that exploded in 2000 when domestic tourism was unleashed and foreigners dis-
covered China's strength, especially after the Asian financial crisis.
The Golden Weeks announcement of guaranteed vacation “put it all together,” said
Cranley. “Now we have to deal with our success. We're all experimenting to find the sweet
spot where tourism is working for China and where Chinese tourists feel they are free as
tourists.”
Bill and I met many of those Chinese tourists at the site of the First National Congress
of the Chinese Communist Party, when the party was officially founded, a critical mile-
stone on the road to revolution. The house in the French Concession is an essential stop
on the “Red Tourism Highway.” The crowd entered the stone home with a degree of re-
spect I hadn't seen before in China. Inside, visitors stood quietly before a tableau of man-
nequins representing the initial thirteen delegates with Mao Zedong at the head, a gather-
ing of modern China's founding fathers.
It is one of the premier sites along the “Red Tourism Highway” that began six years
earlier to recognize China's Communist traditions and to make tourism “more consistent
with the times and reality.” Six billion Chinese have visited one of those sites, accounting
for roughly 20 percent of domestic tourism, generating millions of dollars and creating
nearly 1 million jobs.
On our last day we met a native of Shanghai whom I will call Pan. She is fourth-gener-
ation Shanghai, the great-granddaughter of one of the first Chinese Methodist ministers.
Her family once owned a comfortable home near the Bund but lost it after the Chinese
revolution. When private property was restored, they were not given back their home. We