Tourism Essay -3rd Draft

The Landscape of Tourism

With its beautiful beaches backed by mountains Dalian is ideally situated on the Liaodong peninsular in Liaoning province, Dongbei (North East) China, to receive a large portion of domestic as well as international holidaymakers.  Unlike the more frequently visited locations such as Beijing, Xi’an or Hangzou, Dalian offers a completely different experience than purely temples and history.  The past 20 years have seen Dalian set about becoming an attractive city with many green parks and its many beaches provide extra weight for its tourist market.   The former Mayor of the city Bo Xilai set about making Dalian full of green areas during his governing in the 1990s so that now Dalian has an abundance of leisure space within the confines of the city as well as the surrounding area.

It is obvious wherever you look or whenever you turn on the television now in China that this is a country undergoing rapid changes to both the economic and natural landscape as it progresses through its own industrial age at an impressive rate.  Leisure tourism is always a strong indicator of the social development of a country and China is no exception, with many businesses springing on the opportunities that tourism can generate for an area.

With a population now topping 1,300 million, the most populace country in the world received 131 million inbound tourists in 2007, around 26.11 million of whom were foreigners reported the China National Tourism Association.  The political changes within China in the past quarter century have led to an opening up of China to foreign tourists on a scale unimaginable during the time of Mao, and with the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 all eyes are on China to see how she will cope with the large influx of foreign tourists.

Domestic tourism is not to be ignored here either with domestic travel figures reaching 1,610 million also in 2007, with each traveller averaging an expenditure of 482RMB.  As a total this makes domestic tourism big business in the 21st century China as it progresses down the path of development.   The demand for domestic tourism in China has risen out of economic development within China, typified by the rise of the new middle class within Chinese society.  The middle class is defined by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as those households with assets worth between 150,000RMB (£10,000) to 300,00RMB (£20,000), and by Euromonitor International as those households with an annual income of between 60,000RMB (£4,000) and 300,000RMB (£20.000).  Whilst China has purportedly 106 billionaires, it is this new middle class, or “middle stratum” as the Chinese officials term it, is the centre of a huge amount of the economic change currently underway in China.  This new segment of Chinese society amounted to 80 Million in 2007 according to Euromonitor International and they predict it will top 700 million by 2020.  A more traditional method of assessing the presence of a middle class is they are the section of a society who often rise out of poverty into the levels of wealth where they can afford to buy a house, a car, afford education and importantly for our purposes here, afford an annual holiday.

Leisure tourism owes its much of its history to the Industrialisation of Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the new British middle class –the factory and machinery owners, the traders and the oligarchy started using their free time for leisure tourism.  This later spread to the working classes with the rise of the seaside resort and improvements in transport infrastructure in the UK allowing people to affordably access resorts such as Blackpool, Southend-on-sea and Weston-Super-Mare.

The rise of cheap air travel world wide in the past decade has bought the opportunities for foreign travel to even greater heights, with many locations now depending on foreign tourism as an intricate part of their economy.  This has led to a change in many locations to make room for these migratory tourists and greater and greater impact on the landscape as the built environment increases to provide leisure entertainment.  The increasing number of millions of tourists who now annual arrive in China are demanding increases in entertainment options in line with what they may be used to in their own societies and as such China is having to redevelop areas at an astounding rate to meet demand.

Dave Wyatt has experience of working with many environmental issues concerning the relationship between man and his environment.  This work includes working with a community of Albanians who migrated to a heavily polluted area in Albania called Porto Romano in order to seek out work in nearby Durres, work on land rights issues from the West Bank in Palestine that was exhibited at the Chobi Mela IV in Bangladesh in 2006 and work on environmental research into crop growing in desert environments being undertaken in Spain for use in Africa.  He has had work included in a variety of international exhibitions and published in both magazines and reference books.  His work today focuses on the relationship between man and the landscape.

Dalian is a city stuck between vast natural beauty and the ever-present human condition of commercialising nature resulting in an often-bizarre landscape that aptly represents China’s rapid surge for progress.  The development of theme parks alongside this natural beauty perfectly illustrates the global culture of advertising tourism to beautiful unspoilt areas that in reality come under threat through the increased visitation and development of the landscape.   Much like in documentary work of photographers such as Joel Sternfeld and Martin Parr in the 1980s in which we saw the sprawl of the growing middle classes in the West, China is now to experiencing the early ruminations of this same phenomenon and where better to witness it than through how a culture spends it’s leisure time?

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Killing Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.