“Shangri-La” and the New “Great Game”: Exploring Tourism Geopolitics Between China and India

Abstract

This paper investigates Chinese outbound tourism to India through the lens of tourism geopolitics—a term which has been little used in tourism research thus far. Chinese outbound tourism has been limited until recently by the Chinese government explicitly because of geopolitical concerns. The paper thus examines both the historical geopolitical relationships between China and India as well as the contemporary views of India by Chinese tourists and vice versa. It concludes that both countries have sought to increase tourism flows between their countries in recent years, however, tourist's perceptions of each country have remained ambivalent at best and reflect the geopolitical uncertainties between the two countries.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Lijing Xu for her work sourcing and translating the Chinese material for this paper.