Imagethief is repeatedly awed by the ability of Chinese tourism to strip the magic out of nearly any location. I realize that the Chinese are not the only people to have generated obnoxious tourists. My own United States has exported a dismal assortment of Winnebago-wide, Hawaiian-shirt wearing, bullhorn-voiced tourists to destinations around the globe over the years. But few peoples seem to have industrialized the process in quite the same way that the Chinese have over the past decade.

Part of the explanation for this is that the Chinese haven't yet discovered the charms of independent tourism, or nurtured that "one man against nature" sensibility that has inspired generations of Western backpackers and wilderness hounds and sold countless millions of dollars worth of trendy outdoor gear. The Chinese like their tourism like their restaurants: well serviced, loud, sociable and smoky. To this inclination they have added some unique touches, like matching hats (I've thought about collecting Chinese tour group hats), the colored tour-guide flag and the all-important bullhorn or portable public-address system.

I have had the occasion to be reacquainted with the phenomenon of Chinese tourism on several recent trips. A couple of months ago I went to the Changbaishan nature reserve, on the North Korean border of Jilin Province, with my father and Mrs. Imagethief. There we hauled ourselves up the brutally steep and dangerous staircase that leads from the main valley up to the splendid and scenic Heaven Lake (which is the name the Chinese use for all pretty, alpine lakes, by the way). After an aorta-rupturing, ninety-minute death march we arrived at the mystical and legendary lake to find hundreds of squawking tourists, an enormous, bronze statue of the mythical Heaven Lake monster (a giant otter with fangs) with which you could have your photo taken and a food stall loudly announcing the availability of barbecued squid through a megaphone every thirty seconds. Fortunately, as is always the case, the Chinese tourists clustered together like antelopes -- perhaps expecting anyone who wandered away from the herd or who appeared sick or old to be picked off by the lake monster. This made it easy for us to wander up the wildflower-speckled sides of the valley  to a more isolated spot, where the hubbub of the beach front faded to a distant walla punctuated by the occasional amplified ululation of "tieban youyuuuuuuuuuuu!"

Three weeks ago, we went with my brother to Cuandixia, the ancient "Ming village" on the far side of Beijing's western hills. The first warning of Cuandixia's discovery by the masses came when our driver expressed surprise that the dirt road leading to village had been nicely paved since his previous visit, two years before. But, of course, that made it so much easier for the dozens of tour busses to get there. We rented rooms at one of the houses at the top of the village, where the kindly couple who lived in the house cooked peasant meals for us and served us rounds of agreeably cheap Yanjing beers. The only problem with our rural bliss was that every thirty minutes an enormous tour group would barge into the courtyard and be escorted on a megaphone-aided tour of the household. We simply became part of the attraction. On your right, a wall featuring an illustration of Fu Lu Shou. On your left, two big-nosed foreigners and a Chinese-looking girl who talks funny and might be their translator. Anyone want to take pictures before we go up to the ceremonial hall?

Lest you think that this is a blanket condemnation of Chinese tourism, I hasten to point out that I find watching Chinese tour groups a fabulous diversion. When friends or family visit China and ask me where in Beijing they should go, I always direct them to the Forbidden City. But I advise them to ignore the displays, which are mediocre and poorly explained, and instead to spend their time watching the endlessly entertaining interactions and behavior of Chinese tour groups. I believe you can learn a great deal about Chinese society very quickly by doing this.

In fact, Imagethief is trained as scientist (really) and observing Chinese tour groups has kindled in the dark and ethically suspect corners of his mind a desire to perform various experiments on them, purely in the interest of advancing the frontiers of human knowledge. For instance, what would happen if you stole the flag? Would the group slowly disintegrate as people lost their point of reference? Would they switch allegiance to another flag? What if you separated three or four individuals from the pack? Would they conduct a systematic search for their group, vocalize distress calls, or simply wander in directionless circles like ants who have lost the chemical trail that guides them? If you were to pay off the guide to start giving completely nonsensical explanations through the megaphone --The Forbidden City was built entirely by trained long-tailed macaques imported from Malaysia and fed on diet of pre-chewed winter dates and polished rubies. The monkeys were bathed by naked concubines and worshipped as hairy construction gods. Their monkey-turds glittered with rubies and were prized above all things...-- would people take it seriously or raise doubts at some point?  Is whatever comes out of the megaphone incontrovertible doctrine? These are things I want to know.

Nevertheless, I think we need to draw the line for Chinese tourism somewhere, and space seems like a good place to draw it. That's why I was alarmed to see the following Reuters article on CNN.com this week:

China may enter space tourism race

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- China may one day offer trips into space for tourists, a senior official said on Thursday, outlining the country's plans to launch more rockets, explore the moon and even help farmers by using satellite transmissions.

Sun Laiyan, head of the China National Space Administration, also defended the cost of the space program, saying Beijing spent far less than the United States, it benefited ordinary people and was anyway a matter of national pride.

***

"The success of our manned space missions, becoming only the third country in the world to put a man into space on our own, is a source of pride for the Chinese nation," Sun told a news conference to launch a white paper on the next five years of the space program.

***

Sending up tourists, like Iranian-American telecom billionaire Anousheh Ansari who paid $20 million for a stay on the international space station, is another option China could go for, Sun said.

"Once our technology is more mature, more reliable, there is this possibility. Not only male tourists, but female too," he said.

***

"We think that China's space program can solve many economic and social problems that we are now facing," he said.

Well, that's tax-dollar justifying bureaucratic optimism if ever I saw it. Even in the United States the only actual problem the space program ever solved --other than problems created by the space program itself, like how not to blow up on launch-- was how to arbitrarily stick objects together so they wouldn't drift apart in microgravity. Thus was the miracle of Velcro delivered unto the world. While it is laudable that the Chinese, always sensitive to the need to develop indigenous technologies, might find it desirable to create an entirely domestic version of Velcro (perhaps using pig bristles as opposed to nylon) it seems likely that modern technology could make it possible to accomplish this without actually having to launch rockets.

Nevertheless, there is no arguing with bureaucratic momentum, and once a major dairy is sponsoring your space program and you have celebrity astronauts, one has to admit that, like it or not, Thunderbirds are Go. Therefore, one also has to take the threat of Chinese space tourism seriously. While Sun Laiyan, the head of the China National Space Administration, is quoted in the article above suggesting that individual wealthy tourists might be the target of any Chinese space-tourism program, I think we can all see this as the thin end of a very large wedge. After all, amenities and services that begin as the exclusive provinces of the wealthy, such as air travel, motor vehicles, diabetes and an inflated sense of one's importance in the grand scheme of things, have a way of being marketed down to the masses with the passage of time. Such is the foundation of economic progress. It doesn't, then, take too active an imagination or too large a dose of recreational intoxicants to envision a future where noisy busloads of Chinese tourists in matching, colored space helmets are being rocketed into the ether and trooping through the International Space Station is noisy hordes. On the bright side, this means that someone will have finally found a use for the International Space Station, to this point merely the most extraterrestrial of white elephant boondoggles.

On the downside, some disturbing prospects are raised. Among these are the inevitable collision of rural Chinese toilet habits with a microgravity environment. Imagethief recalls his experiences in toilets ravaged by rural Chinese tourism as among those times when he was most grateful for the tendency of gravity to make things stick to the ground and not drift about unpredictably. (Although he can see the attraction of being able to avoid contact with any surface, including the floor, in such situations.) He also believes, having been confronted in such environments with visceral evidence of the surprising expulsive strength of the human colorectal muscles, that Newton's second and third laws of motion* suggest that a Chinese space toilet might be a very dangerous environment indeed. Suffice to say it brings new meaning to the phrase "explosive decompression". And as long as we are discussing the problems of excreta and secreta in space (and about now you'll be wondering why you've read this far), how would one deal with the spitting issue in space helmets? Tape maxi-pads to the inside, under the chin? Little one-way valves?

Nevertheless, progress and commerce march ever forward and clever men of science will no doubt conquer these problems as they have conquered so many others through the centuries.

As for the rest of us, if you're looking for peace and quiet it looks like space tourism's days may be numbered. After all, who, while contemplating the surpassing majesty of the heavens, the cosmic expanse of the universe, the very naked face of creation itself, wants to be brought crashing back to the surly bonds of Earth by an amplified voice hawking barbecued squid?


  Hey, is that one of the monkeys that built
  the Forbidden City? Let's check its shit
  for rubies!

*Newton's second and third laws of motion:

Second law: The acceleration of a particle is directly proportional to the resultant external force acting on the particle and is inversely proportional to the mass of the particle.

Third law: If two particles interact, the force exerted by the first particle on the second particle (called the action force) is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to the force exerted by the second particle on the first particle (called the reaction force).

You can see how these might be relevant.

Note: Image, as always, from Stefan Landsberger's incomparable Chinese propaganda posters site.

Bonus pop culture quiz: The title of this post owes a debt to what show?


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