The Post-Mao gazes: Chinese Backpackers in Macau

This paper offers insights into backpacker tourism from the People’s Republic of China. Chinese backpackers are a distinctively post-Mao reform generation growing up at a time when China shifts from Mao Zedong’s socialist policies to Deng Xiaoping’s policy explorations with capitalism. Through distanced virtual ethnography of a leading internet forum, it has been discovered that the forum members’ post-Mao backpacker gazes appropriate the postcolonial spaces of Macau in ways that contradict existing backpacker ideals and media and academic portrayal and stereotyping of Chinese youths, particularly concerning gender role adoption and the exoticising of postcolonial leisurescape. Backpacking in Macau also reveals the communal and differentiated nature of the tourist gaze and Chinese mobilities.

► Illustrates the constrained freedom of Chinese backpackers. ► Describes tourist gaze as shaped by post-Mao Chinese society. ► Illuminates the travel of Chinese backpacker gaze in postcolonial spaces.