many, many good photos of Guizhou’s minorities, see www.flickr.com/photos/rietje/
But is it real? Or just for tourist dollars?
image from article “National Tourism Fair kicks off in China’s Guizhou,” 2013-04-19 , Xinhuanet,news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2013-04/19/c_132323642.htm )
Tourism in Guizhou: the legacy of internal colonialism.
Authors Oakes, T. S.; Lew, A. A., Editors Lew, A. A.;Yu, L.
Book Tourism in China: geographic, political, and economic perspectives. 1995 pp. 203-222, ISBN 0-8133-8874-0, Record Number 19951805070
Abstract:
This chapter explores the role of tourism as a development and modernization strategy in Guizhou Province, China. In particular, it examines how tourism is promoted as part of broader efforts to commercialize the rural economy in Guizhou. Although tourism-enhanced commercial development in remote rural areas offers a practical solution to rural Guizhou’s lack of economic integration, a lingering political economy of internal colonialism is, in many ways, being reinforced by tourism development. This is illustrated on two levels. At one level, the geographical concentration of tourism income in urban areas is being encouraged. The tourism industry in Guizhou is state owned, and locally initiated commercialism, particularly in rural areas, remains undeveloped, due to powerful urban-bureaucratic control of tourism planning, investment and development. On another level tourism involves a process whereby particular images and experiences of places are constructed and sold to the tourist. This chapter traces the historical patterns of both the internal colonial legacy and the post-Mao reforms as they have affected Guizhou’s society and economy. It suggests that tourism, as a state sponsored modernization strategy is, in many ways, being channelled by the historical political economy of internal colonialism. For the state, modernization entails very specific and limited goals, ranging from a more civilized society to a stronger army. Yet, the representation of China’s non-Han periphery is very much implicated in this burgeoning discourse on Chinese modernity. Tourism development in non-Han regions of Guizhou should thus be viewed within a framework which perpetuates representation of China’s non-Han periphery as the antithesis of modernity. The state-controlled centralization of tourist investment, revenues and planning means that there are few opportunities for local engagement with tourism development, such that ethnic regions such as Guizhou are portrayed for tourists according to the dominant images expected of such regions: their remoteness, backwardness, and un-modern primitivism.