Vicarious Tourism: Sightseeing Tours of the “New China” for Relatives of Overseas Chinese

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, while the fledgling Overseas Chinese Travel Service engaged in its primary business of organizing tours of the homeland for members of China’s vast diaspora, it also worked with local government agencies nationwide to organize domestic tours for the relatives they left behind. The goal of these tours was twofold, and followed closely the goal of tours organized for overseas Chinese themselves. By showing those with relatives abroad some of China’s scenic sites and examples of socialist construction, officials of the Overseas Chinese Travel Service sought, on the one hand, to burnish the image of socialist China overseas. On the other hand, tourism officials sought to motivate these tourists to encourage their relatives overseas to contribute financially to the continued success of the “New China.” This was a project that increased in urgency as overseas remittances and investment declined during the Great Leap Forward and China continued to be squeezed by Western economic embargo. Though the view of the nation that this gave overseas Chinese communities was an indirect one, relatives on the ground were perhaps the best agents for transmitting the image of progress and stability that officials in China’s overseas Chinese affairs departments wished to project abroad. To address perceived misunderstandings surrounding the “New China” among overseas Chinese communities, tour organizers first had to address the suspicions of the family members they left behind. To accomplish this goal, organizers used these tours to provide participants with what they described as a “visual education” of socialist construction. Through an examination of official tour reports prepared amid the tumult of the Great Leap Forward, this paper analyzes the organization and goals of this unique program and its contribution to both building and imagining the nation in the early People’s Republic.