SEASONAL LIFESTYLE TOURISM: The CASE OF CHINESE ELITES

• Seasonal lifestyle tourism is a widespread phenomenon.
• Seasonal lifestyle tourism blurs the line between tourism and migration.
• Chinese seasonal lifestyle tourism has a long history.
• Elites give a markedly Chinese flavor to seasonal lifestyle tourism.
• The cultural practices of new elites differ from the traditional ones.

This article analyzes Chinese seasonal tourists, whose cultural practices originate from and provide new meaning to traditional Chinese elite culture. We place contemporary seasonal lifestyle tourism in China in its broader socio-historical context and describe how recent political changes have reshaped the place and significance of these practices within Chinese culture at large. Grounded in an anthropological approach, we draw on an exploratory qualitative study of seasonal tourists in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, to illustrate the multiple issues at hand. Our ethnographic fieldwork findings reveal surprising similarities as well as expected differences between Chinese seasonal lifestyle tourism and comparable practices described in the scholarly literature elsewhere.