Tourism 300 Word Excerpt

The Landscape of Leisure

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.

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 also 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 Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Killing Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.