Hu Wants You

As China's president tours America, the government in Beijing is on a campaign to get tourists beyond the country's big cities -- and into its vast interior.

By STAN SESSER AND MEI FONG
April 22, 2006; Page P1

GUIZHOU PROVINCE, China -- Chen Hua Jin, a resident of the beautiful village of Langde, slung onto the side of a mountain above a fast-flowing river, has just cooked her visitors a hot-pot lunch of local pork, tofu and greens. They're delighted, and she's happier still, having just earned $10 in a place where the average family income is $250 a year.

With its breathtaking limestone mountains and terraced rice fields, Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China. Now, tourism is coming to the rescue. As the 43-year-old Ms. Chen cooks, the women of this Miao tribal village, wearing colorful native costumes, perform a dance for a busload of tourists from Hong Kong, which is a half-day trip away, divided between a plane and car. Other women sell textiles and jewelry from tables set up along the steep stone walkways.

SEEING THE REST OF CHINA

Two-day, three-day and five-day options for business travelers who are interested in a side trip after their work is done.

China is beset with rural poverty: The growing income gap between the rich of the coastal cities and the rural poor is a major issue for the Communist Party. In response, the government is pouring $10 billion into the tourism infrastructure of dozens of scenic but impoverished areas -- from historic sites along the old Silk Road, to mountains considered holy by Taoists and Buddhists, to national parks. For travelers, this means an alternative to China's teeming metropolises -- and a break from the crush of tour buses that plague a growing number of sites. But in many of these places, there are still obstacles that may intimidate some tourists, from language barriers to a lack of indoor plumbing -- even the occasional restaurant where the specialty is dog. While Western-brand hotels are expanding into the interior, others are aging state-owned institutions with suspicious-looking stains on the carpet and extremely hard mattresses.

Guizhou Province, the size of Minnesota and home to 39 million people, serves as a prime example of what is now available. Cut off from its neighbors by its towering mountains, the province had long been isolated. But now visitors can fly nonstop to its capital, Guiyang, from Shanghai, Beijing and many other Chinese cities, disembarking at a gleaming modern airport with super-efficient baggage retrieval and check-in. From Guiyang, the gateway city of Kaili, where tourists who visit the ethnic minority villages can stay in relative comfort, used to be a bumpy seven-hour drive on a winding country road. Now it's a 2½-hour ride on a divided four-lane expressway. New hotels in both cities offer comfortable accommodations with free, high-speed Internet access, at the bargain prices of $85 a night in Guiyang and $50 in Kaili.

With its crystal-clear rivers and unpolluted air, the valley presents a side of China that visitors to the eastern and northern parts of the country might have despaired of ever seeing. During four days in the area, we never saw another Westerner; only 270,000 foreigners visited Guizhou Province last year, including the businessmen who stayed only in Guiyang.

Scenes from Guizhou: A child from the Miao village of Qinman

Very few of Guizhou's residents speak English, even in Guiyang's two five-star hotels, imposing huge hurdles for anyone who wants to tour the province without first hiring a guide, car and driver. And of Guizhou's 2,000 tour guides, only about 35 are English speakers; they'd quickly be overwhelmed if Americans and Europeans started arriving en masse.

Although Guizhou's 49 ethnic-minority groups, each with a distinctive style of dress and many with distinctive cuisines, represent an enticing tourist attraction, China didn't fully open the province to foreigners until 1997.

Working with the provincial and local governments, the United Nations World Tourism Organization formulated a master plan to bring tourists to seven ethnic-minority villages of Guizhou's Bala River Valley as a demonstration project in how to alleviate rural poverty. "Tourism in Guizhou is the only sector that can uplift the quality of life," says Xu Jing, the tourism organization's regional representative for Asia and the Pacific. "They tried other sectors like minerals and forestry, but it cannot be sustainable from a long-term perspective. Instead of cutting the trees, tourists can look at the trees."

The new project hasn't resolved all the problems of traveling in Guizhou. Although Guiyang's airport has been upgraded to international status, no airline has yet started international flights, so travelers in Southeast Asia, which is relatively close, can't add Guizhou to their itineraries as a short hop.

Elsewhere, similar projects are under way. In the center of the country, Jiuzhaigou is a national park with stunning glacial lakes, waterfalls and a panda reserve. This year, airlines will be adding six flights from Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities. That has prompted local authorities to launch a $36 million expansion of the nearby Jiuhuang airport.

Non-Chinese speakers may have a slightly easier time in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, a semi-autonomous region of China, and Buddhism's heartland. In recent years, Tibet been in the news for its political woes. But with better rail, road and air routes in the works, its thousand-year-old monasteries are about to become more prominent. The world's highest railway, linking Beijing to Tibet, was completed in October. Starting at the end of this year, it will be possible for the first time to make the trip by rail, in 48 hours.

In the south, the central government is spending $324 million over five years to turn the little-known town of Zhaoqing into a showpiece that includes eco-tourism hikes and visits to Ming-era villages. One promised tour stop: Bagua Village, a pentagram-shaped hamlet built along feng-shui principles and populated with traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Overall, the planned $10 billion investment in tourism infrastructure over the next five years is almost half the total figure of the previous two decades, according to the China National Tourism Administration.

The government is looking to do in tourism what it did in manufacturing two decades ago. Its decision to create "special economic zones" in the 1980s to boost foreign investment -- at a time when the economy was still largely state-controlled -- transformed peaceful rice farms into powerhouses that now make a large chunk of the world's sneakers, DVD players and flat-panel screens. But the development has been uneven, enriching mostly coastal areas and helping to trigger unrest in lesser-developed parts of the country. In 2004, the last year for which data are available, there were about 74,000 social demonstrations in China, compared with just 10,000 such incidents a decade earlier.

Another motivation for the government: China's economic czars are anxious to boost spending on services -- including tourism -- as the country tries to transition from being an export-led economy, which has it made vulnerable to a growing protectionist backlash from its trading partners. Some critics say protectionism is also at work in its travel industry. Foreign travel agencies chafe at China's slow pace in allowing outside competition, as is required by its membership in the World Trade Organization.

In the same way that China has taken manufacturing business away from higher-wage countries in Asia, its new push has the potential to redraw the region's tourism map. If it can develop a dozen new destinations, it could attract travelers who might otherwise take their vacations in other countries in the region, like Thailand or Japan.

Wang Ba

Already, China's tourism boom has meant growth opportunities for everyone from hotel companies to makers of camping equipment. French chain Accor, which has 34 hotels in China, is opening 30 more by the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Other hotel chains expanding in China include Sheraton, InterContinental and Super 8. For now, many of these companies are expanding in China's big cities and the surrounding areas. They face competition from local companies such as Shanghai-based Jinjiang Group, China's largest hotel operator, which has ambitious plans inside and outside China.

The investment in remote spots of China could give it a leg up on some nearby countries where poor planning and a flood of visitors have already stripped tourist attractions of much of their charm. In Guizhou, the ethnic-minority villages are largely pristine, a stark contrast with Thailand, where such villages have been often ravaged by the impact of uncontrolled tourism. The predominant minority in Guizhou, the Miao -- known outside of China as Hmong -- live in eye-pleasing wooden houses with roofs of black slate tiles. They're more likely to wear traditional dress than jeans and T-shirts. Although a visitor's interpreter has to translate, people will readily invite a foreigner into their house to talk. And the local cuisine is distinctive and delicious, emphasizing local fish cooked in sauces with a sour tang from pickled vegetables.

In Wang Ba, a Gejia-minority village of 1,200 people two hours north of Kaili, tourists pay for dance performances, buy handicrafts and eat in people's homes. A year ago, the villagers hit the jackpot when 34 members of the Harvard Alumni Association arrived, paying $5 each for lunch and $180 for a performance.

Pan Cheng Ya, Nanhua's mayor, said the village earned $60,000 last year from dance performances alone, with a thousand foreigners visiting. That has created new wealth locally. Some families have cellphones and televisions, and kids have new toys, he says. Still, tourism is proving far from a panacea. Almost all the young people go off to wealthy coastal cities like Guangzhou looking for jobs. Mr. Pan himself has to supplement his salary of $15 a month by working on construction projects. And now he has to deal with a new problem: the suspicion of the villagers that he and other local officials are getting rich from the tourist boom. "Money has become a sensitive issue," he says. "They think we get all the benefits. Whatever we tell them, they don't believe us."

--Cui Rong and Candace Jackson contributed to this article