ABSTRACT
Economic globalization and advances in transport and communication technologies are central to increased travel. Travel by business people, tourists, and diasporas has stimulated the mobility of capital, goods, services, people, knowledge, and disease from one location to another (Urry 1995: 173; chapter 18 in this volume). Until the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, international travel for both play and work had taken off in an upward direction. This event adversely affected passenger numbers and miles travelled on a global scale. The SARS outbreak in spring 2003 did not have the same global impact but did severely affect travel to and from Hong Kong, some other Asian cities, and Toronto. Largely in seeking to capture these mobile flows, cities, regions, and nation-states compete to imagine and sell their historical image and locational advantages to international investors and tourists in an ever-tightening global economy (Kearns and Philo 1993; Short and Kim 1999; Hall 2000). Within the tourist industry, diverse destinations are constructed to capture the flow of tourists and to direct them to specific sites of play (Judd and Fainstein 1999). These destinations often involve the construction of various forms of ‘adventure’ and/or ‘otherness’ that can ‘spice-up’ the experience of specific tourist play (Hooks 1992). This chapter specifically examines Hong Kong before and after the 1997 transition from British colony to Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China, and the changing nature of its East-West play within the global tourist economy.
