THE CHINESE MARKET - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 248

When Bill and I were flying home to Washington—a fourteen-hour journey—I realized
that no other country has affected me like China. It is hard to fathom how much of the
future of the world's tourism industry is in the hands of the Chinese. With its pastiche of
official top-down control over tourism, its nascent bottom-up entrepreneurship, the built-
in corruption and mandatory propaganda lessons, China is hardly a model for a business
that protects and enhances locations and provides a steady, aboveboard profit.
Part of the short-term logic behind the model is the sheer number of tourists coming
and going to China; especially since the government has given “Golden Weeks” of paid
vacation to its population of 1.37 billion and a directive to them to see the world. The oth-
er foundation is China's basic economic model. The Chinese penchant for tearing down
the old to be replaced by “anywhere” architecture or ersatz “olde China” fuels growth in
that system, but it also diminishes the country's long-term appeal to tourists.
Then there is the pollution. It is a health problem and a symptom of the wide envir-
onmental damage wrought by China's industrialization. Tourism can't be neutral in the
face of the polluted air, water and landscape that Deng had predicted; while Marriott and
WildChina have offset programs, they are symbolic of what needs to be done rather than a
solution. The speed and size of tourism's growth makes it difficult to imagine how the in-
dustry will reduce rather than exacerbate the problems. While tourism officials argue that
in the new world, everyone has a right to travel, China presents you with a vivid picture of
what happens if that travel isn't well managed with the future in mind.
The Chinese government's tourism policy has succeeded in several ways. Tourism has
helped spread the image of China as a new, modern nation. Compared to the draconi-
an image of Communist days, China appears open to tourists who speak no Chinese and
have three weeks at best to traverse this continent-size nation. They don't notice the plain-
clothes policemen patrolling Tiananmen Square for potential dissidents or understand the
tight political and cultural censorship. They do not use the Chinese Internet and have
no idea of the severe censorship that blocks entire websites with anything critical of Ch-
ina—all in the name of “harmony.” Nor do they see routine police arrests, without war-
rants, of dissidents and protesters . . . the list is long.
And the Chinese government has realized its other goal during this long period of ex-
perimentation and is making handsome profits, as Deng also predicted, but those are dif-
ficult to trace.
The stakes are equally high for foreign countries that are counting on the Chinese tour-
ists to improve their business futures by traveling abroad in great numbers and spending
equally large sums of money. As Jonathan Tourtellot of National Geographic said, “If the
Chinese get it right—if they figure out the right balance—then tourism is great. If the
Chinese get it wrong, we're all cooked.”