Review of A Landscape of Travel in Pacific Affairs

Travis Klingberg (U Colorado Boulder) has written an insightful review of my book, A Landscape of Travel, for the journal Pacific Affairs. In his review, he notes how my book extends and updates much of the earlier scholarship on ethnicity and tourism in China, as well as presenting new arguments on the intersections of mobility and development in rural China.  Klingberg writes, "In highlighting the role of migrant subjectivities and labor, Chio has at the same time helped clarify the relationship between migration and tourism in China. The rediscovery of rural and remote China by urban Chinese has been a significant social and political change over the past two decades in China. This is a question that I have pursued in my own work. But mobilities of leisure and labour don’t map cleanly onto the schematic movement of urban tourists to rural China and rural labourers to urban China, and A Landscape of Travel is a valuable study of how closely related these mobilities are." Additionally, he also points out important comparative, future work that needs to be done on tourism in China -- in non-ethnic minority regions, for example, and also in the discursive deployment of "green" urbanization project or "ruralizing" urban spaces.

A preliminary version of the review is now available online and will be in the print version of the journal in a future issue. A PDF of the online version is also available here to download. I'm grateful for the time and attention to my work by Klingberg, and of course it's exciting to see my work being situated more deeply in the (relatively) small field of China tourism studies as well as across disciplinary perspectives.