Tourism is never simply about economics and the movement of people: it both reflects and influences culture, identity, society, and even politics. Moving across time and space, this panel explores the circulatory histories and relational geographies that connect Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, and Australia. Rather than treating Hong Kong and mainland China as places apart, the panel interrelates their divergent and convergent histories through the emergence of mass tourism. Carroll shows how from the 1950s up to 1997 the Hong Kong Tourist Association represented the colony’s distinct geography and political status through visual imagery, which also negotiated challenges of “integration” with the opening of the PRC in the late 1970s. Wong demonstrates how Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s flagship carrier, fashioned a distinct sense of cosmopolitan lifestyle that both mirrored and shaped that of the colony itself, and stitched it into the international map. Cartier examines, as a consequence of the impacts of mass travel from mainland China to Hong Kong, Macau, and beyond, the CCP Department of Publicity’s policies of “civilized tourism” that extend governance over urban citizens to international travel. Gao-Miles analyzes the complex conjunctures among tourism, consumption, and social media to discover how transnational Chinese consumer tourism is reshaping places from Hong Kong to Japan and Australia. Drawing on disciplinary matrices in history, anthropology, geography, and cultural studies, and through theoretically informed interdisciplinary and multi-sited approaches, the panel explores the transnational, dynamic processes of people and place that have changed cultural relations between China and the world.

Organiser

John Carroll (Professor, Department of History, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Chair

Tai-lok LUI (Chair Professor, Department of Asian and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Paper Presenters

John Carroll (Professor, Department of History, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Carolyn Cartier (Professor, School of International Studies, The University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)

Linling Gao-Miles (Lecturer, College of Arts & Sciences, The Washington University in St. Louis, USA)

John Wong (Assistant Professor, School of Modern Languages of Cultures, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Discussant

Tai-lok LUI (Chair Professor, Department of Asian and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

**Search for individual paper abstracts by searching the name of the panel here