Chinese Tourists in ‘Elsewhereland’: Behaviour and Perceptions of Mainland Chinese Tourists at Different Destinations

A mobilities approach to tourism from emerging world regions

“…The Communist regime until 1978 saw in tourism a wasteful bourgeois practice (Arlt, 2006). Hence there was no significant outbound tourism until the last quarter of the twentieth century.…”

“…The economic reforms of China's transition towards a market economy, following its 1978 announcement of an 'open door' policy (Cai, Li & Knutson, 2008), were accompanied by increasingly more liberal tourism policies. In 1983 'family reunion' trips to Hong Kong and Macao were permitted, and later extended to some South East Asian countries (Arlt, 2006). The most important new policy instrument, the Approved Destination Status (ADS) system, based on bilateral tourism agreements between China and other nations, was launched in 1995 (Li et al, 2010).…”

“…In Asia, especially in contemporary China, a 'craze for travel' or luyou re (Chan, 2006) has emerged, growing from travel's deep roots in Chinese culture (Tse and Hobson, 2010), but its main outbound travel aspiration is for destinations in the West, considered, like in Latin America, as more prestigious than the more easily available, but less exciting, intra-regional travel. A distinction can thus be made between 'outbound travel,' an etic category referring to crossing a national boundary, and the representation of a destination as 'abroad,' an emic category, referring to the sense of contrast between a destination and one's home country, perhaps best exemplified by the Chinese term 'elsewhereland' (Arlt, 2006). Intra-regional travel involves exposure to different, sometimes complex, combinations of familiarity and strangeness, which impact upon its representation.…”

“…As China became one of the fastest growing source markets for countries such as the US, Canada and the UK (Cripps, 2013, Li et al, 2011, studies of outbound long-haul Chinese tourists have proliferated (e.g. Arlt, 2006;Leung et al, 2013;Li et al, 2010). As China became the focus of attention of the bulk of studies on tourism from Asia in the last decade, Winter (2009a: 30) warned that it is 'vital that the immense cultural, political and historical differences across the [Asian] region are not dissolved by an analytical conflation, whereby China comes to speak for the whole of Asia.…”

Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China1

“…Rather, here English represents a ‘semiotic opportunity’ (Blommaert 2010) for constructing a ‘sense of place’ (Gieryn 2000; Johnstone 2010), in specific terms a ‘global village’ for domestic tourists. In a country where learning English meant learning communist or Maoist doctrines (see Ji 2004), and where tourism was cracked down on as capitalistic during the Cultural Revolution (see Arlt 2008; Urry 2002), it is desirable to look into deeper sociopolitical factors to find out how tourism and English acquire new social meanings and how that relates to the formation of a ‘global village’.…”