Histories and Cultures of Tourism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. Xx, 295 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 9781501761041.
Historians were relatively late to draw in tourism as a defining force of modernity, but they have been more than making up for it, with detailed, polished, nuanced, and creative approaches to studying tourism that connect travel to various social and political arenas. Into this expanding field comes Mo Yajun’s Touring China, a book that carves up its own space by simultaneously connecting tourism to (1) a non-Western area, (2) to domestic travel (although this term must be used delicately in the context of early twentieth-century China), and (3) the underappreciated Republican (Nationalist) period. It is precisely its measured approach to exploring the combination of these unknowns that gives the book its scholarly precision and applicability to a wide range of interesting topics, including nation-building and the politics of leisure. Most narratives of China tend to gloss over the period from around 1911 to 1948 as an interim between the imperial period and the communist era. Thus, a study of tourism in this era cannot help but shed new light on tourism as a larger historical process, one that grounds and assists in the maintenance of those supposedly homogenous spaces we treat as nation-states.
With the understanding—inspired by nationalism scholars like Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner—that nations are made through imaginative, educational, cultural, and material practices, we have learned to think about the formation of the nation-state as a continuous process, and one that is contingent and never completed. Thinking and feeling about the nation, however, differ across contexts. For China, which now consists of several million square kilometres of territory, composed of numerous regional languages, terrains, and customs, there have been many intermediaries that have aided its visualization and encouraged a shared recognition of the nation as a real totality. As Mo depicts, it was travel, and with it travel institutions like railroads and banks, print media like magazines and brochures, and highly mobile cultural entrepreneurs that assisted in the sacralization of an essential China-scape from Manchuria to Lhasa, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong. Moreover, it was in the period of greatest violation (the Japanese occupation) that travel, limited though it was, gave the greatest consecration to an inviolable national span and heritage.
Of particular value in our understanding of mobility as concomitant with nationalism is the discussion of the business side of touring at the beginning of the book. A major source for Mo is the China Travel Service (CTS) and its magazine China Traveler, which early on imagined expanding banking operations as symbiotic with expanding travel routes. Much like American Express and Thomas Cook added to the predictability of currency exchange and cultural negotiation for novice travellers, so did the CTS attempt to ensure a benchmark quality standard, suppressing the types of vices and disorders, as well as the potential rip-offs, that rankle travellers. The brilliance of the CTS was that they were able to reimagine various railway routes as passages through the Chinese past or windows into exotica. Often forgotten in studies of tourism are the ways that tourism sectors depend on infrastructural promotion, from the maps provided by oil companies for American highways, to the railway salesmanship of Canada, or in Mo’s case how Lufthansa Airlines sponsored exploration of central Asia. Transportation infrastructures provided both material and imaginative affordances for national exploration.
Another major strength of the book is the discussion of the affective nature of travel. The reservoir of emotions for the cultural nationalist is filled with such comparative reactions as shame, regret, grievance, pride, nostalgia, lamentation, and resentment. No less than the founder of the CTS, Chen Guangfu, connected the need for domestic travel services with a harrowing experience in Hong Kong where the clerk from Thomas Cook ignored him to chat with a white woman (21). Contact sites such as the French Vietnamese border, occupied Manchuria, southern Taiwan, and multi-national scientific journeys into the northwest launched visitors into ontological considerations and the reconciling of cognitive dissonances. By tracing their quotidian encounters, Mo provides welcome interiority to these educated Chinese, those whose very contingencies of mobility seem to require they more precisely define an everlasting Chinese culture and territory.
Where I wish the book had a bit more to say would be on the comparative nature of travel. While we get a good sense of the on-the-ground contacts during the 1920s to the 1940s, we lose sight of travel as an international enterprise. It seems the key travel writers learned something of proper travelling through experiences outside the Qing and Republican worlds. The magazines often provided both Chinese and English captions. Why would English be included? As decoration? As a cultural emblem? As mere imitation of foreign texts? Oddly enough, just like the ethnic classification system that the communists used to understand the diversity of their country, many descriptors of Chinese places seem lifted wholesale from foreign accounts. Given the contradictory, complex ways in which these nationalists both wanted to connect to modern currents and still preserve distinctiveness, it would have been worth exploring a bit more how travel “travelled” to China. There is an interesting digression concerning Japanese students bearing witness to imperial rule in Manchuria (chapter 5), but such interchanges are few. While I appreciate that the author firmly follows the source material, there is a bit too much concentration on cultural nationalists. Although they had the most representational power over the contested terrains of the period, there is a slight missed opportunity to appreciate the case at hand in a more mobile world of steel, aluminum, tanks, radio, rail, and General Motors.
Nevertheless, Mo’s book carefully weaves together politics, media, tourism, and nationalism into a timely story of national passion meeting physical and technological mobility. We would do well to consider the Republican decades as makers of national priorities and national priorities as tied to the everyday touring of landscapes.
Gregory Fayard
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong