Yajun Mo has written a persuasive account of travel culture in Republican China, shedding critical light on how the Chinese construction, imagination, and consumption of modern tourism reflected the anxieties of Chinese modernity in an age of imperialism. Touring China draws from an impressive range of sources, including gazettes, guidebooks, travelogues, newspapers, and tourist companies’ archival documents. Mo argues that the reading public in core regions of China actively engaged with Chinese borderlands in richly illustrated guidebooks and travelogues even before they gained the opportunity to tour them personally. These mental journeys, in turn, transformed “outlying regions into powerful locations in the imagining geography of the fledgling nation-state” (p. 7).
Mo further argues that what differentiated the modern experience of tourism from the earlier periods was the establishment of the China Travel Service (CTS) and the rise of independent travel clubs. These companies and clubs regularized the tourist experience by providing group tours, publishing guidebooks, and constructing lodging to serve eager travelers. Subsequently, travelers who made their way to Northwest and Southwest China and the regions of Manchuria and Taiwan expressed a range of emotions during and after their visits, including disappointment at fabled tourist sites mentioned in premodern texts in Northwest China and discomfort with their inability to fully communicate in Mandarin in postretrocession Taiwan. The experience of tourism was thus intimately tied to the changing spatial imagination of China in a postimperial age.
Chapter 1 reveals how banker Chen Guangfu initiated modern Chinese tourism by establishing a travel department at his Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, the success of which led to the establishment of the CTS in the 1920s. Together with independent tourist clubs such as the Unison Travel Club, the CTS grew its tours and lodging facilities by taking advantage of the expansion of railways and motorways in Republican China. Chapter 2 reveals how the rich illustration and description of tourist sites across China in the CTS's China Traveler and Liangyou Magazine fueled the popularization of a panoptic view of China's national space even as it sought to represent distinctive tourist attractions. Chapter 3 reveals how Chinese intellectuals’ travels to Northwest China produced knowledge of what they considered integral regions of China, shaped by the broader histories of Qing-era expansion in the area and Japanese and Western colonialism throughout Asia. Chapter 4 reveals how Nationalist China's retreat to Southwest China after a series of military defeat to the Japanese during the Second World War simultaneously disrupted and stimulated travel and tourism, opening new travel attractions such as Three Gorges and Guilin to Chinese travelers even as its operation in the eastern seaboard ceased. Chapter 5 explores Chinese intellectuals’ visits to Manchuria in the 1920s and Taiwan between 1945 and 1949. The history and legacies of Japanese development and discrimination in these regions, Mo explains, evoked a sense of nationalism, envy, loss, and displacement for Chinese travelers.
The key strength of Mo's book is her rich and careful reconstruction of the diverse mainland Chinese voices in shaping Chinese tourist culture. We encounter Yenching University student Xiao Qian, who criticized fellow students for heading to popular sites in the Northwest to boast of their travels to friends in Beijing rather than to truly understand the region (p. 118). We encounter essayist Sun Fuxi, who wrote in the CTS's China Traveler urging fellow Chinese from the coastal region not to regard the allegedly poor and backward Southwest with contempt (p. 155). We meet historian Guo Zhusong, who recommended purging pro-Japanese thoughts from the Taiwanese people, lamenting that the highly educated Taiwanese people could not be easily indoctrinated because of their high levels of literacy acquired under Japanese rule (pp. 198–99). Mo's deft analysis of these uncovered accounts transcends existing scholarship, which focuses largely on the travel experiences of elite intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen, rather than a wider range of voices.
Mo's excellent reconstruction of diverse mainland voices could be augmented with a similar approach in understanding voices from the borderlands. Understanding how people who originated from or recently migrated to the Northwest, Southwest, Manchuria, Taiwan, and elsewhere encountered tourists from the center could further complicate the nature of Chineseness and what constituted “Chinese” travel culture. Moreover, an exposition of residents from the peripheries visiting China, such as Taiwanese intellectual Wu Zhuoliu's visit from Japanese Taiwan to occupied China in the early 1940s, could further contextualize Japanese imperialism in shaping the diverse identities of people in Chinese East Asia. CTS head Chen Guangfu's decision to retreat to Taiwan in 1949 and his consequential determination to continue operating the CTS on the island could add to Mo's critical intervention on how the CTS contributed to changing geographical notions of China and Taiwan after 1949. Further exploration of these encounters and contingencies could help readers determine how Chinese travel culture was also constituted at and from the borderlands alongside the cultural centers in cosmopolitan Chinese capitals.
In sum, Touring China deserves a wide readership for the critical questions it raises about tourism, infrastructure, and representations of Chinese borderland regions from new Republican Chinese perspectives. The monograph reveals continuities and changes in modern Chinese tourism through close attention to the peculiarities of borderland geographies, sites, and histories as shaped by the patrons and consumers of Chinese tourism. Mo's book reminds us of the importance of considering the mobility, creativity, and misperceptions of Chinese tourist companies, their customers, and independent Chinese travelers as central to the construction of twentieth century China and its peripheries.
