Tourism and Musical Performing Arts in China in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century: A Personal View

This paper aims to be a personal and limited view of how tourism has affected the musical performing arts in China in the first decade of the twenty-first century. As a personal interpretation, it is based largely on experience, but supplemented by websites, statements and some Chinese and English-language scholarly studies. The musical performing arts focused on include various styles of indigenous musical theater (xiqu 戯 曲), especially Kunqu 崑曲 and Jingju 京劇, and a variety of minority performance traditions. Chinese tourism has itself increased enormously in recent years. Not only are more people visiting China, but more Chinese are travelling within their own country and abroad. 1 Increasing numbers of sites and objects have been opened to tourists and even deliberately exposed to “the tourist gaze” (Urry 2002) in order to make them more widely known and to make money. Among these tourist sites and objects are many that are cultural in one way or another, such as historical and/or religious buildings, ethnic villages, and live performances. Especially relevant for this paper is the fact that Chinese tourist companies have specifically 1 According to official figures (cited by Ryan and Gu 2009: 6), inbound tourist numbers rose from 17,833,100 in 1984 to 132 million in 2007, while over the same years domestic tourist numbers increased from 240 million to 1.61 billion. Inbound tourists in both years include those from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. The figures for both inbound and domestic tourists have risen consistently year after year, apart from a slight downturn in 2003 because of the SARS crisis. Over the same years, the total receipts from inbound tourists multiplied by nearly 35 times, while income from domestic tourists expanded nearly 100 times (Ryan and Gu 2009: 6).