A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China

Studies on Ethnic Groups in China

by Jenny Chio

While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely touted tourism for its potential to bring wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but the policies underlying the development of tourism obscure some complicated realities. In tourism, after all, one person's leisure is another person's labor.

A Landscape of Travel investigates the contested meanings and unintended consequences of tourism for those people whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in China's rural ethnic tourism the residents of village destinations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ping'an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), Jenny Chio analyzes the myriad challenges and possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to do the work of tourism. She addresses the shifting significance of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of tourist photography, and the effects of touristic desires for "exotic difference" on village social relations. In this way, Chio illuminates the contemporary regimes of labor and leisure and the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern in China today.

More about the

Genres: China, Anthropology

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

What about the people who make the tourist trap happen, who live there and are trying to make a living? This book provides an engaging scholarly examination into the lives of people who are trying to make a living by performing for tourists in communities in rural China. The author uses the idea of a "landscape of travel" as a metaphor that helps her focus on the ways residents dress up their communities for tourists and what it means when tourists move in and migrant laborers move out of these communities. We learn about the importance of tourism, bringing people to places where they expect to see minorities presented in standardized ways, in shaping what it means to be "ethnic" in China. People interested in the sociology and anthropology of rural life, economic development, and tourism will find it a worthwhile read.