By Noel Salazar

Seasonal Lifestyle Tourism: The Case of Chinese Elites
Noel B. Salazar (University of Leuven, Belgium) and Yang Zhang (Macao University of Science and Technology, China)

Annals of Tourism Research
Volume 43, October 2013, Pages 81–99

This article analyzes Chinese seasonal tourists, whose cultural practices originate from and provide new meaning to traditional Chinese elite culture. We place contemporary seasonal lifestyle tourism in China in its broader socio-historical context and describe how recent political changes have reshaped the place and significance of these practices within Chinese culture at large. Grounded in an anthropological approach, we draw on an exploratory qualitative study of seasonal tourists in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, to illustrate the multiple issues at hand. Our ethnographic fieldwork findings reveal surprising similarities as well as expected differences between Chinese seasonal lifestyle tourism and comparable practices described in the scholarly literature elsewhere.