ABSTRACT
As late as the mid-1990s, the issue of whether China should support or discourage domestic tourism was contentious within government circles. Its opponents argued that tourism bred immoral behavior, wasted resources and distracted the population from productive activities. The precipitous decision, in 1998, to designate tourism a ‘new key growth area of the national economy’ and, in the following year, to create three weeks of public holidays, giving the Chinese people unprecedented stretches of leisure, was triggered by the ‘Asian financial crisis,’ as the government faced an urgent need to increase domestic consumer demand. The measures resulted in a dramatic transformation of urban Chinese lifestyles, not only creating a domestic leisure economy but also sending foreign governments scrambling for the Chinese tourist, predicted by the World Tourism Organization to dominate the global tourism market by 2020. In 1990, based on bilateral government agreements, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand became the first countries to receive Approved Destination Status (ADS) from China, meaning that Chinese citizens could legally travel there as tourists. In the 2000s, this program has been expanded to a wide range of countries, including the European Union and Australia. The introduction of on-arrival visas in some Southeast Asian countries of the region and the arrival of low-fare airline Air Asia in the mid-2000s have meant further incentives to travel. According to official statistics, 30 million Chinese citizens traveled abroad in 2005, continuing a steady exponential rise.
