ABSTRACT
The People’s Republic of China, long regarded as the last frontier for the tourism industry, has been a latecomer in leisure travel and tourism. Such activities were in fact for decades ridiculed as a wasteful and potentially dangerous bourgeois activity, only to be employed as a tool of foreign politics. Since 1978 however, as a part of the biggest economic miracle heretofore witnessed by mankind, leisure travel, both domestic and outbound, has been embraced by the Chinese people with much greater enthusiasm than the Chinese government anticipated or wished for.
