Introduction

As “a picture is worth a thousand words”, we begin this book with the following photograph (Figure I.1). It shows the front of Sinothai, a restaurant located in the heart of the bustling Patong district on the island of Phuket in Thailand, which we discovered a few years ago. In fact, during a previous field trip dedicated to observing the practices of Chinese tourists, we could not miss this permanently booked-out establishment, with an almost exclusively Chinese clientele. It has to be said that the restaurant had succeeded in attracting this clientele: a menu adapted to their palates, efficient Mandarin-speaking servers, the possibility of using Alipay and WeChat Pay, but also and above all, an ingenious set-up of partnerships with some of China’s biggest tour operators to provide a framework for these individuals’ trips. While writing the final pages of this book, in February 2023, we had the opportunity to revisit the street known as Patong 3 and witness the activity of a place that had become an institution for thousands of Chinese travelers looking for a taste of home. In 2019, Thailand welcomed nearly 40 million visitors, including 28% from mainland China, its biggest market. This meant that no less than 543 billion baht (around 15 billion euros) in annual tourism revenue (Industry Team 2023) was not injected into the country’s local economy, and this is when China decided to impose strict restrictions preventing its citizens from leaving its borders in January 20201. As a result, in tourist hotspots such as Phuket, Koh Samui and Chiang Mai, which have become heavily dependent on Chinese tourism, countless SMEs like Sinothai had to close their doors.

Figure I.1. Sinothai restaurant available for rental (after Meng Li, February 2023).

This example illustrates the significance gradually acquired by these tourist flows from China, which, until this sudden halt, affected a large part of the globe. By 2019, 155 million visitors had made nearly 170 million international trips, generating almost $255 billion in tourism spending2. According to the World Tourism Organization3, China had been the world’s leading tourist-sending country since 2013, and the one generating the most revenue from the sector. These records have been achieved, despite the fact that the Chinese tourism phenomenon only really began in the 1980s, and has only really been democratized since the new millennium. This growth went hand in hand with the country’s dazzling economic development, as it became the second largest power behind the United States in terms of global GNP, and its ambition to change a world order hitherto dominated by Western liberal democracies. This is where the importance of understanding Chinese tourism lies, and where this book takes on its full meaning: while the birth of “modern tourism4“hinges on the emancipation of individuals exercising their free will in the implementation of their travel plans, Chinese tourism was built within a “socialist model with Chinese characteristics”, in which the all-powerful party-state is observed throughout all facets of society. However, far be it from us to suggest that the tens of millions of people who travel abroad do so under the close supervision of the authorities. The reality is far more complex and multifaceted. Indeed, Chinese international tourism has many layers, and this is what we are going to illustrate by analyzing it in its entirety, from the mechanisms taking place within the territory to the course of its protagonists’ stays beyond the country’s borders; and this in the popular destinations of Southeast Asia as well as in the heart of Europe.

Written by three geographers, this book has been conceived according to a spatial rationale, and has thus been divided into three distinct parts based on the knowledge acquired during the three unpublished field trips carried out by each of the authors5. First of all, Maxime Dejean will immerse us in the main source markets of the People’s Republic of China, where travel projects are designed and prepared by companies in the sector, while also being supervised by a regime that ensures that they do not lose control. After a first general chapter that leads to the understanding of a tourist system built as much to respond to a demand from the population as to the ideological aspirations of the regime, the book moves onto Wuhan, a city now well known throughout the world, with an introduction to its tour operator market in which the mechanisms that take place before departures abroad will be highlighted. Meng Li will take us 4,000 kilometers further south, to the island of Phuket in Thailand, the country most visited by Chinese tourists. She will show us how local players, mainly from the Chinese diaspora, have appropriated this market and adapted to tourism, which, a few years ago, was still mainly supervised by large specialized tour operators from China. Finally, in a third and final part, Marine L’Hostis will guide us towards understanding a distant and much more exotic destination in the eyes of tourists from the Middle Kingdom: France. Its territory, made accessible since 2004 by agreements authorizing the arrival of strictly supervised tourist groups, is today also popular with much more autonomous individuals in search of otherness and immersive experiences. Chapter 5 returns to the processes that lead the Chinese to acquire tourism skills and emancipate themselves from organized groups. Chapter 6 analyzes the representations associated with France by tourists and the practices in which they are achieved. Then Chapter 7 focuses on the spatial diffusion of Chinese tourism in France.

We have kept this introduction brief for one simple reason: we need to round it off with a brief overview of Chinese international tourism in the period prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. This preamble will have a historical dimension, recalling the major stages in the emergence of the tourism phenomenon in a Chinese political environment that gives it all its specificity. It will then take a geographical approach to illustrate in concrete terms how this history has shaped the 170 million tourist flows recorded in 2019. This step is essential to contextualize and facilitate the understanding of each of the upcoming parts.

History of Chinese outbound tourism development

From 1949 and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China until the reforms of 1978, following Mao’s death, China experienced a deliberate 30-year period of “non-tourism” (Sofield and Li 2011). This period saw the country completely shut down and tourism classified as a bourgeois activity that did not respect communist thinking. Travel both within the country – with the introduction of the Hukou system, the identity document attaching citizens to their city and making travel outside their place of residence almost impossible until the 1980s – and outside the country was completely banned, with a few exceptions for diplomats, executives and “good functionaries” of the Party (Sofield and Li 1994). For an ordinary citizen, the mere fact of expressing the desire to travel abroad would have made them a traitor to the country, with consequences we can only imagine (Gerstlacher and Sternfeld 1991). It was not until 1978, with Deng Xiaoping’s seizure of power and the start of his reforms to modernize the country, that things changed and the country was able to begin the transformations that have enabled it to become, in 35 years, the leading country for international tourism in terms of both flows and revenues generated (Figure I.2).

This development involved four distinct phases, which we will now describe.

Figure I.2. Chinese international tourism: arrivals and expenditure (1992–2015) (OMT 2015; CNTA 2016, after Meng Li).

From 1983 to 1997: visits to family and friends in the Chinese world

During this period, China gradually lifted travel restrictions to allow its citizens to travel abroad and visit family and friends. This policy was first implemented in 1983 with organized trips to Hong Kong and Macau for residents of Guangdong province, before being extended to other regions via the travel agency China Travel Services. From 1988, this VFR authorization6 was extended to destinations in Southeast Asia, home of the Chinese diaspora, with the possibility of traveling to Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. It should be noted that these trips were strictly supervised and required a letter of invitation and on-the-spot financing by the visiting relatives. At the same time, the authorities allowed cross-border day trips to Sinuiju in North Korea. Although anecdotal in terms of visitor numbers, this approach bears witness to a political strategy that characterizes outbound tourism to this day: encouraging flows to “friendly” countries.

By the end of the first 15 years of operation, nearly 5 million people visited these destinations and thus gained their first access to the outside world. Although only a minority of the privileged people took part in these trips, they were the pioneers of a China that was opening up to the world and taking its first steps toward a market economy.

1997 to 2005: the first official pleasure trips

True to the concept of...