Chinese Tourism in Australia: Koalas, Selfies and Red Dresses (2024)

By: John Connell and Phil McManus and Xuesong Ding

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Synopsis: This book investigates all facets of Chinese tourism in a single destination, and its fascinating rise and evolution. It provides an overview of the first two decades of twenty-first century Chinese tourism in Australia, covering the early days, when Chinese tourism was mainly guided package tours with tourists visiting standard iconic sites, and its evolution into more individualistic tourism, with younger tourists seeking out sites of particular interest. Many of these ‘new sites’ are places where self-photography has particular merit, chosen in part because they are colourful, and images are distributed in real time to communicate with others and enhance social status. This quest for distinctiveness and colour has contributed to creating a distinctly Chinese tourist geography of Australia, analysed here in relation to conventional tourism geographies. The book takes a deliberately chronological approach to focus on the speed of change, discussing the more exciting and active ’new tourism’ in ways that integrate qualitative and quantitative research, and provide a basis for international comparison and discussion of key emerging themes in tourism studies.