Tourism is a complicated business, particularly if you are a villager in a poor, rural minority area of China. Jenny Chio's recent work focuses on the nuanced social impact of tourism, refreshingly adopting a “backstage” point of view from which to examine rural tourism. As leaders of minority villages tussle with officials, tourists and even each other in an attempt to get “doing tourism” right, Chio focuses on the effects this has on culture, power, identity and ethnicities. Chio utilizes to good effect the lenses of scene and visuality (the need to look appropriate to a tourist), as well as movement and mobility, to analyse dilemmas confronting rural residents. The result is a satisfyingly insightful and convincing account of the stunningly complex landscape of tourism in rural China.

Of the many strengths of this research, two are particularly pronounced. First, the volume includes exceptionally rich research based on Chio's extensive fieldwork in and beyond two villages. This unusual penetration into the world of tourism allows Chio to compare the impact of developing tourism sites in two unique, yet comparable, rural villages. In Ping'an, Guangxi province, tourism is centred on terraced fields. Because tourists primarily take pictures at a limited number of specially prepared platforms, the villagers are challenged with trying to get tourists to stay longer and deepen their engagement with the village. Moreover, the primary benefits are captured by a company privileged with selling tickets to tourists entering the area. The process of trying to calculate and attain fair shares of this income is as well documented and convincing as it is troubling. For Upper Jidao, Guizhou province, a tourist spot based on Miao ethnicity, the challenge included how to attract greater volumes of tourists and spread the benefits more widely. The pressures from government, tourist expectations and from the residents themselves struggling with the optimal way to define and display ethnicities are deeply analysed. Chio is a vivid writer who uses her extensive fieldwork and visual eye effectively.

Second, as an outsider not to rural tourism but to the visual anthropological lens that Chio brings, I found her use of two conceptual tools – scene/visuality and movement/mobility – especially effective in understanding these two villages. Scene/visuality is about looking good to the tourist's eye, a concern with what visitors might expect to see in an ethnic Zhuang village in the case of Ping'an or a Miao village in the case of Upper Jidao. Ironically, economic growth, poverty reduction, and development – the very point of the tourism industry – sometimes conflicts with this. As the villagers emerged from poverty, they invested in more comfortable housing and more modern conveniences and spent less time tending the field, which clashed with the image villagers were trying to convey. Chio documents this phenomenon through the changes in architecture, language, environment and landscape. Movement/mobility is used equally effectively, as the desire to achieve a better life pulls local residents out of the village – the same pressures to migrate felt throughout most of rural China – but also encourages them to stay. Tensions emerge as modernity is interpreted as leaving the traditional lifestyle, while the local livelihood depends on locking residents into often-invented traditions. Frictions linked to commercialization of culture lead to unintended consequences, unresolvable contradictions, and in some cases even violence.

Yet even as Chio uses her fieldwork and her conceptual tools to good effect, I was left hoping to understand more comprehensively what it all means. Perhaps a more complete literature review would have extended Chio's analysis outside these villages, and brought an even deeper understanding of the phenomena she examines. To be sure, Chio applies theoretical tools, but she mainly introduces these concepts as she needs them. In places, this threatens to descend into the jargon that seems to pervade similar projects, yet Chio carefully defines her terms and uses them effectively. Still, I would have appreciated more of an attempt to situate her research in the larger literature, which is done only briefly, primarily a single paragraph spanning pages 9–10. The volume's “backstage” point of view is insightful, but I was unclear exactly how this differs from other accounts that also seek to understand the predicaments and sacrifices of “doing ethnicity.” A sharper contrast with previous literature would not only have helped an outsider to the field situate Chio's analysis within the literature, but would also have allowed the lessons from this research to permeate more deeply back to theory.

Yet, this is a minor quibble for a book that explores its ground deeply. It will contribute greatly to China scholars’ understanding of tourism in rural China as well as tourism scholars' understanding of China. At the same time, the author's insights into ironies and dilemmas are written vividly and accessibly enough to use in an advanced undergraduate seminar.