Looking East but learning from the West? Mass tourism and emerging nations

In the United Kingdom, domestic mass tourism began in the mid- nineteenth century during a period of peace and increased prosperity. It was facilitated by the railways, that enabled the rapid movement of people in bulk, and later by mass production of the motor car. Similarly, international mass tourism emerged in Europe and North America after the second World War, with stability, increasing prosperity, and advances in air transport. Similar socio-economic and political conditions led first to mass domestic tourism and then international tourism in Japan and China, and in both the state played an explicit and supportive part in tourism development. In all cases, mass tourism increasingly attracted academic attention, as seen most recently in the explosion of studies (in English and Chinese) of inbound and outbound Chinese tourism. There have been calls for a new ‘paradigm’ to analyse the development of Asian (most notably Chinese) tourism, which raise crucial questions as to whether or not ‘science,’ ‘paradigms’ and tourism studies can or should be tailored to study mass tourism because of its increased importance in East Asia.

Reproduced here with permission of the Asian Journal of Tourism Research.