ABSTRACT
The opening of international tourism in China China was essentially closed to foreign visitors soon after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to rule the country in 1949. The few foreigners who did manage to visit China in the 1950s and 1960s were mostly from communist bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, North Korea and North Vietnam. Some early eorts at resurrecting a tourism industry were made in the mid-1950s, but these were set back by the political instability of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s (Lew 1987). Following that period of widespread starvation in rural China, interest in tourism grew modestly, with the eventual creation of the Bureau of Travel and Tourism in 1964. A small number of international tourists from Western countries (4,500 in 1966) were allowed to visit China during this period just before the start of the Cultural Revolution (late 1960s to early 1970s) when tourism again became almost non-existent.
