ABSTRACT
China’s international tourism as a whole came into being in the late 1970s when the country began to open its ‘door’. International tourist activities in Guilin and Suzhou took place much earlier. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, Guilin and Suzhou were among the few destinations in China which received international ‘guests’ from other socialist countries. Around the mid-1970s, international tourism began to take its shape in these two places. In Guilin, the number of international ‘guests’ and tourists rose from 1,000 in 1973 to 48,200 in 1978, and in Suzhou from 12,300 in 1975 to 27,700 in 1978. 1
