A different ‘Chinese dream’ : perceptions of individualism, consumerism and life trajectories among young Chinese backpackers

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A different ‘Chinese dream’

Perceptions of individualism, consumerism and life

trajectories among young Chinese backpackers

Photo by Chaoxing

Janne Cress, student number 10188681 E-mail: jannecress@gmail.com

Contemporary Asian Studies Graduate School of Social Sciences

Supervisor: C.H. (Tina) Harris Second readers: S. Lan and O. Sooudi Master thesis, submitted on 26 June 2015

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大理下雪了

这对于你是惊喜。你离开上海，不回家乡，躲避到这个西南边境的小镇，就是为寻觅这一份清白。你流浪，轰轰烈烈地聚散，爱过人，也被人爱，到头来，只想过最简单的生活。刚来大理，你还是不满意。阳光太烈，樱花太浓密，沟里的水藻太油腻缠绵。

而人们，被阳光烤得懒散，散发着蓬勃的欲望，对于食物，对于性。

January 10 2015, public weblog of a male informant

Snow in Dali

This is a surprise for you. You left Shanghai, did not return home, and escaped to this small town near the South-Western border, just to look for purity. You wander around, meet and part tirelessly, you have loved people and have been loved, but in the end, you just want to

live a simple life. You have just come to Dali and still, you are not satisfied. The sun is too strong, the cherry blossom too dense, the algae in the ditches too greasy and entangled. And

people, being lazy and roasted by the sun, are exhaling vigorous desires for food, for sex.

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Acknowledgements

At the end of my research, I gave postcards and small Dutch souvenir-clogs as a little thank you. ‘But I’ve heard it’s impolite to give shoes’, I said a little insecure to Ling, the man in Dali who helped me so much with my research. ‘Because the word “shoe”, or xiè in Mandarin, has the same pronunciation as “evil”.’ ‘Oh, really?’, he said doubtfully. ‘I’ve never heard of that. But… Xiè also means thanks! So it’s perfect, actually’.

I want to thank Richard, Meike and Jelmer for supporting me and having to miss me for three months – hah hah – but also having to cope with me while I was panicking about visa problems, deadlines and other stressful events over the past few months.

Of course, I would also like to thank my supervisor Tina Harris, who helped me to get the most out of my research with helpful and extensive feedback, while still giving me all the space I needed to make this project ‘my own’, and Shanshan Lan, who has provided many useful comments as well.

Finally, and most importantly, I would really like to thank everyone who helped me with my research by agreeing to do an interview, discussing their ideas about Chinese backpackers with me, or simply allowing me to hang around. Thank you for entrusting me with your beautiful, exciting, revealing and inspiring stories. You showed me what it is like for a young person to live in contemporary China, and how important it is to believe in your own abilities. Make all your dreams come true.

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Introduction

Yes, I feel lucky. It’s March and 25 degrees. A blue sky is clearly visible - a rarity in China, but not in this province, Yunnan - and I am on the backseat of Weiyuan’s motorbike. He has been travelling around China for a few months now, and since last week I have joined him, together with his female friend Chaoxing. We are riding around Erhai lake, and Weiyuan seems to have no problem with riding eighty kilometres per hour without wearing a helmet or basically any kind of protection. I get a little nauseous when I think about the possible dangers, so I close my eyes and focus on the sensation of my skin being burnt by the sun and cooled by the air at the same time.

It is one of those moments during which I have been working on my project for so long that I would almost forget what I’m here for. But travelling, and the physical experience of actually moving, allows me to reflect on the events of the past days. Here I am, doing research about backpackers in the same country that I went to during my own first backpacking trip. Was it only three years ago that I went on this ‘adventure’? I can clearly recall myself standing in the airport of Beijing, on the one hand confused about what to do and scolding myself and my impulsive ideas, but on the other hand stirring with excitement. People say that airports are the same everywhere, but I disagree; I could smell expensive airport noodles, I heard people talking in a language I did not understand and I saw the splendour of a country that had developed economically with a pace that is hard to believe. But, as befits a ‘real backpacker’, it was only the beginning of a period in which I immersed myself into a new culture, its people and their customs. From that moment, I was hooked on travelling and on China.

‘You’re going to do research about backpackers? You mean, you’re going on a big holiday?’, was a much-heard response to my plan. My academic interest - and I hope this is the case for more people - is indeed embedded in a personal interest. In fact, I have been learning more about China mainly because of my first backpacking trip, when I went to this big and at that time unfamiliar country. Before that, my main image of Chinese people was the stereotype of buses full of tourists, who hop from one capital city to another, taking pictures through the windows and spending their savings on cheesy souvenirs (literally, in the Netherlands - pardon the pun). But during my time in China, I saw that more and more young Chinese started to hit the road and travel independently, without their families, without a tour group, and sometimes even without anyone else.

This new trend fascinated me. Who were those people, and what were their motivations to travel? Were they looking for something, escaping something or both? Gradually, I came to know that the social and cultural landscape of China plays a major role in Chinese backpackers’ desire to travel. Through ethnographic research I wanted to constitute a clear image of these backpackers, and I wanted to find an answer to the following question: ‘How does backpacking impact or transform Chinese young people’s perceptions of their life trajectories and future dreams?’. With life trajectory, I mean the route that one covers during one’s life regarding education, jobs, relationships and other life events. I have chosen to use this research question because of its focus on young people’s agency, while still

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allowing fantasies and dreams – intangible ideals, but also foundations for social change – to be part of it.

My research thus focuses primarily on young Chinese backpackers; what does travel mean to them, and how does travel allow them to make sense of the world they grew up in? At the same time, I use the case of young Chinese backpackers as a window that can show us more about a larger topic: China’s ‘Generation Y’ (born between 1980 and 2000), their hopes, dreams and desires. There has been given an increasing amount of attention to Chinese independent travellers in recent years, but rarely from a anthropological perspective. Most articles are written within the field of tourist studies, and the few sociological and anthropological works about Chinese backpackers tend to focus on lüyou pengyou, also known as ‘Donkey Friends’. These backpackers usually travel in groups, are very active in online communities and engage in outdoor activities such as hiking, camping and mountaineering. Although this is certainly a part of the young Chinese who have discovered backpacking, it leaves out many independent travellers who travel for different reasons than the lüyou. With my research, I hope to fill this knowledge gap about Chinese backpackers, and thereby increase the knowledge about China’s new generation, ideas about their life trajectories and their attitude towards the society they live in.

After giving an overview of my research population, methodology and the debates that are currently going on about these two themes and backpacking in general, I will first show how Chinese backpackers are portrayed by news media, social media and in popular culture. I will also cover who is thought to be a ‘real’ backpacker by my informants. In the second chapter, I explore the different motivations that people in China have in order to go backpacking. After that, I compare these to the experiences that people actually have on the road; is it what they had expected, and what do they learn on the way? Finally, I will look into the ways in which Chinese backpackers go back to society, if they do so at all. With this ethnographic work, I hope to take the reader on a short backpacking trip during which the struggles and dreams of Chinese backpackers as they experience them today become clear.

Throughout the thesis, I will show that backpacking allows Chinese young people to reflect on their society from a different perspective than ‘the Chinese dream’ that emphasizes quick access to financial success and social status, and shows alternative ways of living in a society where many people are confused about their own, but also the country’s identity. Moreover, it allows them to retain a sense of authenticity in their ‘rite of passage’, and helps them to find their ‘true’ selves in exploring different lifestyles. But let us first take a look at what has already been written about backpackers and Chinese society.

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Literature review

In order to find out how young Chinese people make sense of the society they live in and how travelling shapes their life trajectories, I have constructed my research around three main themes: travel and authenticity, individualism in China, and consumerism and counter-reactions. I use these themes because they are of major importance in understanding contemporary Chinese society. Does the backpacking trend indicate a growing sense of individualism in China? Do Chinese backpackers support the consumer society, or do they tend to refrain from conspicuous consumption? I hope to offer an answer to these kind of questions with my research. In the following section, I will discuss the main theories of these themes to provide a theoretical base on which I can build my research. For each theme, I will position my own research within the debates and see how it fits within this theoretical framework.

Travel and authenticity

Within anthropology, travel is a widely debated concept (Chambers, 2000). The discipline itself is inherently tied to travelling, since early anthropological works are often based on reports and diaries from travels to non-Western societies. Nowadays, the discipline does not limit itself to these cultures, but studies Western societies as well. Moreover, the practice of travelling has also received academic attention over the past decades.

Travel, not only backpacking, has often been linked to a search for authenticity. One of the main concepts in theories about modern travel is ‘tourist gaze’, originally developed by John Urry (2011 [1990]), by which Urry means a set of expectations that tourist project on the local population in search of an ‘authentic’ experience. According to some authors, tourism is the result of a feeling of alienation and rootlessness in modern life, which is perceived to be inauthentic (MacCannell, 1976). By travelling to supposedly ‘primitive’ or pre-modern societies, people can retrieve this sense of authenticity. Local populations can, in their turn, make use of these expectations and benefit financially by offering goods and services that will be thought of as authentic (Urry, 1996).

The idea that Western travellers primarily seek a cultural authentic in an exotic elsewhere is countered by Beth Notar (2006), who wants to provide a more nuanced theory by stating that travel is more complex than the dichotomy between an inauthentic Us and a ‘genuine’ Other. Shaffer takes it a step further by arguing that authenticity is not only a social construction, but also a ‘performed achievement where each backpacker pieces together his or her “rite of passage”.’ (Shaffer, 2014: 139). In other words, backpacking is an embodied practice with which one can create authenticity by going, for example, off the beaten track.

Imagination and fantasy plays a big role in the practice of travel. As Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it: ‘[…] I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. […] Mankind has opted for monoculture’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1955). Lévi-Strauss wrote these words sixty years ago, and yet they seem to have become only more relevant through the years. Landscapes, cities and commodities are becoming more and more the same everywhere in today’s globalizing world. Tourism can

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thus be understood as a desire for diversity and an escape of today’s always present monoculture.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Western hippies started hitchhiking and long-term travelling, but it was only in the 1990s that there was a trend that could be called backpacking (Cohen, 2011: 1536). The practice has been interpreted in many different ways. It has been regarded as an escape from everyday life and responsibilites (Maoz, 2007), a rite of passage (Noy, 2004) or to shape one’s identity. Academic literature about backpackers has originally focused on Western people; this literature was mainly related to self development, coming of age and identity (Cohen, 2010). Backpacking seemed to be inherently tied to notions of individualism and self-expression (for example Cohen, 2011 and Sørensen, 2003). In recent years, backpackers from other parts of the world have increasingly gained attention too, example by Ong and Du Cros (2012), who focus on Asian backpackers.

Within the backpacker community, there is also said to be a phenomenon called ‘road status’, which is one’s position in the social hierarchy of backpackers. This status is achieved through experience and proof of these experiences, for example story-telling, passport stamps and visa or flags of visited countries sewn to one’s backpack, and can even be artificially created – Sørensen writes about an informant who deliberately smeared mud on his backpack to look like an experienced traveller (Sørensen, 2003: 856). Put short, being a ‘backpacker’ is associated with a certain identity.

With my research, I want to look at the role of authenticity for young Chinese backpackers and see how travel offers them a sense of authenticity if it does so at all, and why modern Chinese society is considered to be inauthentic. This desire for ‘realness’ and authenticity is a theme that will come up several times in this thesis, not only regarding places, but also regarding the self and society. In the first chapter, I will go deeper into the definition of a ‘backpacker’, and what my informants thought a ‘real’ backpacker was.

This sign, with sarcastic descriptions of a backpacker, can be found at Mrs. Panda hostel in Chengdu (former Traffic Inn). The picture plays with fantasies of authenticity, for example the bracelet he wears: ‘Hand crafted

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Individualism in China

Traditionally, Chinese society is considered to be a very collective one (Steele and Lynch, 2012). Confucian as well as communist ideas have always emphasized the importance of collective networks, such as the state and the family. In scholarly literature too, Chinese notions of selfhood are usually associated with sociocentric or familial orientations, and identity is said to be experienced in relationships with others. This view of personhood is often contrasted with a Western, relatively ‘individualist’ model of personhood, in which individualism is seen as thinking of the self and others as context-free, existing prior to relationships and status categories (Oxfeld, 1992: 269).

Lately, it has been argued that a shift is occurring in China from collectivism to individualism (for example Cao, 2009). But individualism and collectivism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they can exist next to and even reinforce each other (Oxfeld, 2009). One cause of the mentioned shift to individualism would be China’s one child policy that the state introduced in 1979 to get a grip on its fast-growing population. According to both scholars and Chinese citizens, this has led to ‘little emperors’: children receive all the attention of a complete family and who are used to getting everything they wish (Moore and Chang, 2014). Related to this concept are ideas about China’s ‘Generation Y’, or in China more often called balinghou and jiulinghou generations, people who were born in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They grew up in a time of economic growth and welfare and are often said to be selfish and materialistic (Kan, 2013), or even narcissistic (Cai et al., 2012). Like in many societies, there is a sense of moral panic about the new generations: are they able to carry the future of the country? Lately, ideas about China’s new generation have been more nuanced in academic literature, stating that these people are often involved in charity and volunteering, and therefore not at all that egocentric as is often thought (Zhang, 2014).

Regarding Chinese backpackers, one could say that the backpacking trend indicates a stronger desire for individuality and independence. Also in literature about Western travelers, backpacking is usually explained as a desire to get away from the always-present ties to school, work and family (Riley, 1988). In this sense, the individuality of backpacking evokes a feeling of freedom. Especially in China, it is argued that young people experience a lot of pressure from their families, school or work, and the state. Doing well in school, finding a partner to marry and finding a good job are all things to worry about as a young Chinese person. Gradually, young people seem to make their own choices as a way to escape from, or maybe just to cope with these pressures – something that has also become clear from my own research in several ways.

In the last few years, the implementation of capitalism has made for opportunities to get quick and easy access to money in China. The country has often been labelled a neoliberal society (Kipnis, 2007). In a neoliberal society, the economy plays a determining role in the lives of people, and the market forms a stage on which players make rational decisions that have a big influence on their personal lives.. What is characteristic for neoliberal societies is that people make decisions about their futures in a more strategic way, since this determines what kind of job and life they will have. This is what Ann Anagnost calls life-making: ‘… investments in the self to ensure one’s forward career progression as embodied human capital’ (Anagnost, 2013: 2). Anthony Giddens' Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) also relates to this; it explains how we think of the self today as a project to be worked on through lifestyle

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choices. Backpacking, and the different lifestyles that people try out during travel, can be seen as part of such an individualist ‘self-crafting’ project.

On the other hand, there is a strong community of backpackers called luyou pengyou, ‘Donkey Friends’ (the word ‘donkey’ having almost the same pronunciation as ‘travel’ in Chinese). These members often meet online and organize group trips. Thus, from this perspective, backpacking is more a collective activity. Especially in Ning Zhang’s article (2008), the collective aspect of the backpackers’ community is emphasized. In fact, it is not very common for Chinese backpackers to travel solo at all: most of them travel in pairs or groups. Some of them already know each other, others have met on the internet and see each other for the first time when they go travelling. Within this community, there is again pressure to be ‘a real backpacker’; someone who has the ‘know-how’ about the right brands, places to go, and behaviour (ibid.).

Previous literature about Chinese backpackers has focused mainly on the collective aspect of this traveller community (such as Luo, 2014, Lim, 2009 and Zhang, 2008). My research positions itself in this debate by showing that these travellers, who are often found on online forms, are not representative for many other backpackers that often travel solo and do not feel the need to post their stories on the internet. With my research, I want to contribute to definitions of individualism and see if there is something that can be called individualism with Chinese characteristics.

Consumerism in modern society

Since the economic market reforms that were initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, China has been through rapid changes of urbanization and modernization. With the coming of capitalism, commodities have been cheerfully welcomed and celebrated (example). That is why consumerism is much more than simply ‘buying things’: it is defined as a shared ideology that is capable of ‘creating strong attachments to consumption as a way of life, based on a belief in the enduring power of material possessions and commercial distractions to bring happiness and personal fulfilment’ (Dunn, 2008: 8). Wasn’t it Marx who said that matter formed the base of everything (Marx, 1964 [1844])? How ironically true is that now for so many people in capitalist China, who feel they have to take care of their income and material situation first, before they can think about their mental and spiritual happiness.

Although consumerism characterizes all layers of urban Chinese society, it is the balinghou and jiulinghou generations, born in the ‘80s and ‘90s, that are said to be obsessed with it (Lian, 2014). They sacrifice themselves to goods and brands, like the boy who made headlines in 2012 because he sold his kidney to buy the latest Apple products1. Therefore, consumerism is seen as something dangerous, too: indulgence distracts society from social morality and things that are thought to ‘truly matter’, such as family relations and social duties (Nelson, 2000).

Through consumerism, people can shape their own identity (Shankar, Elliott & Fitchett, 2009). Because of the overload of goods and commodities, people have never had more choice in consumption, and through consuming different goods, people can express

1_{Widdop, K. (2012), Desperate Chinese boy, 17, sells kidney for £2,000 to buy an iPad and iPhone.}

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themselves and shape their identities (Chernev et al., 2011: 67). Nevertheless, consuming is collective, since everyone engages in it to a certain extent. Certain brands are associated with certain lifestyles: luxury items from Gucci, Burberry and Louis Vuitton can indicate a social class that people want to be associated with. For a long time, Chinese people were labelled to be equal in Chinese society. With the emergence of consumerism, people start to define their identity and differentiate themselves from others using commodities. In this sense, consuming is a collective activity as well.

Backpacking holds again a fairly ambivalent position in the debate of consumerism. Zhang (2008) highlights idealistic ideas from Chinese backpackers about the desire to get away from the consumer culture, and this may very well be true for Chinese (and Western) backpackers. Backpacking is also often associated with a desire to escape from both the chaotic and polluted urban landscape. In this sense, it is also a desire to be around nature and rural landscapes. Characteristic for backpacking is the challenge to go ‘back to basic’, to experience hardships on the road, by going ‘off the beaten track’ and refraining from any luxuries (Sørensen, 2003). Backpackers tend to pack lightly since they have to carry the weight of their bags constantly on their back. Anything that is not essential for the trip, such as too many clothes or cosmetics, is left out.

At the same time, backpacking is also a practice that takes part in consumerism. As Teo and Leong state: ‘even as backpackers seek an authentic experience by cutting down on commodification, the very power they wield in determining which places are brought into the tourism economy, shows their ability to commodify and set the terms of their relationship with the Other.’ (Teo and Leong, 2006: 113). This process might take place consciously or unconsciously. In any case, the consuming of places is something that is inherently part of backpacker, and tourism in general.

Moreover, with smartphones and tablets becoming more and more common, a new phenomenon has risen: flashpackers. This is a name for are backpackers who take all their gadgets with them while travelling (Paris, 2012: 1095). Whereas flashpackers used to be frowned upon within the backpackers community because of their obvious attachment to commodities, it is now increasingly common to bring a smartphone or a tablet on a trip, perhaps simply because more and more people own them nowadays.

The profound changes that have taken place in Chinese society have made for an interesting situation. On the one hand, the country has a history of communism and socialism, and still emphasizes the importance of social and economical equality among its citizens. On the other hand, capitalism is freely celebrated. My research looks at how young Chinese people deal with this – do they engage in this relatively new consumer culture, or does it make them want to escape it? And why?

The three themes I just mentioned form the theoretical basis that I use to build my thesis upon. I will now write about the practical aspects: the fieldwork I conducted, the methodology I employed, and the consequences of my own positionality for my research.

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Methodology

Setting and research population

During my fieldwork from January to March 2015, I stayed in six different hostels, located in three cities: Chengdu (Sichuan province), Dali and Xishuangbanna (both Yunnan province). I picked these places because of their popularity among backpackers: Chengdu is a place where many travellers stop before they head to Tibet, Dali is a small place with a reputation as a ‘backpacker enclave’, and Xishuangbanna attracts backpackers because of its tropical climate and its proximity to Laos. Chengdu turned out to be not as crowded as I had hoped because of the time of the year (it was January, and most people visit Chengdu in the summer), but Dali proved to be a good choice. The hostels I stayed in focused on backpackers in particular, and organized activities such as hiking tours and cooking courses.

I had anticipated on people travelling together as many articles stated that this was the case, but unexpectedly, most backpackers that I interviewed had travelled solo and also preferred travelling alone over travelling with friends. This might have to do with the fact it was off-season when I was in China; the people who normally backpack in groups and pairs might be able to travel only during the summer holidays, whereas the people that I encountered now often quit their jobs or worked while travelling. This resulted in meeting people who were usually experienced travellers, and who had very outspoken ideas about Chinese society and culture.

I also interviewed two non-backpackers, who were travelling independently as a pair (so they were not part of a tour group), but who travelled with a suitcase and did not identify themselves as backpackers. Interestingly, they had very different ideas about Chinese society, and especially consumerism, than most other people I spoke with. Only one man I interviewed identified as a lüyou, a ‘donkey friend’. Together with his mother, he made trips with a group, and they climbed mountains and camped in the wilderness. Similarly to the two girls, his ideas were fairly different from other backpackers.

All my informants were urban citizens, in the sense that they studied, worked or lived in cities like Beijing, Chengdu and Chongqing, or had done this at a certain point in their lives. Some of them were born and raised in small villages, but moved to the city later, when they went to boarding school or university. Some of my informants could be called ‘lifestyle travellers’ (Cohen, 2011); they had quit their jobs to travel for a year or longer, and sometimes got flexible jobs on the road to earn some more money to travel. Most informants were in their 20s or 30s, with only a few people in their late teenage years, or early 40s.

Methods and data

For my research, I have employed several methods. I conducted 45 semi-structured interviews with 48 different people (three times I interviewed two friends who were travelling together and did not have enough time to be interviewed separately). 27 of my informants were male, 21 were female. 11 people I interviewed were working in a hostel at that time, and had been travelling independently themselves as well, while 5 people actually owned a hostel. I did 33

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of my interviews in English, 7 with an interpreter – usually a friend who happened to be around and who spoke English fairly well, and 5 in Mandarin.

Most interviews took around one hour, some of them two hours and a few were 30 minutes or less. Interviewing was my most important method, since it allowed me to get rich and deep data about the lives of my informants: their youths, their ideas, their dreams for the future. Most interviews were planned and took place in an informal setting, such as a café or hostel lounge, and I recorded them with a small voice recorder. I used a list of questions as a guide line, but was flexible enough to switch to other topics whenever interviewees brought something interesting up.

Two people have been of crucial importance for getting me in touch with people. One is a hostel owner who put a lot of effort in finding informants for me, and he often sent new guests to me so I could interview them. Another one is a man in Dali, who was not a backpacker himself but who knew a lot of people who were, so he linked me up with them and also informed me about presentations of backpackers. Apart from them, there have been several sources for me to get in touch with interviewees. The most important place to meet backpackers were hostels itself, where I could meet people in the dorms or the lounge. I have also met a few informants through Couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.org), a website to find people that offer a free ‘couch’ to sleep on, but where people can also post messages and join events to meet other travellers. The third method of finding people was ‘snowballing’: people introduced me to friends who were backpackers, and they introduced me to other people again.

I also used participant observation as a method to gain a better understanding of the experiences of backpackers. From February 16 to 28, I travelled together with a Chinese boy and girl from Kunming to Dali, where we stayed in a hostel for a few days and camped outside for one night. In Xishuangbanna, I also spent a day with three Chinese backpackers. This method allowed me to do observations about interactions between travellers, and see how decisions were made. I could also participate in activities such as selling things on the street and trying to sneak into attractions without a ticket – things that I had no access to without actually travelling together with people. Next to this, I have attended two presentations that people gave about their travel experiences. One was from a boy who had travelled around the world and had done a lot of voluntary work, the other one from a couple that had travelled to Thailand. Both presentations were held in the Song Sisters’ Bookshop in Dali, which is part of the Jade Emu hostel but which is freely accessible to everyone. They attracted an audience of 10 to 15 people.

Before I started my research, I planned on using social media analysis as a method to find out to what extent the things that people did while travelling, or told me during interviews corresponded with what they posted on social media. I also wanted to carry out photo analysis, and see what people took pictures of when they were travelling to find out what kind of things people attached value to. However, these methods turned out to be not as useful as expected, because there was little I could conclude based on these posts and pictures Conduction interviews has therefore been the primary source of my data.

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Reflexivity

My research population was, as expected, a very open group of people and I did not meet any people who were not willing to help me with my research. However, I noticed that my position as a fellow backpacker has been important to get access to my research population. A lot of people asked me during interviews about my own travel experiences, and whether I was a backpacker too. One informant, who invited me over for Chinese New Year even said that he had invited me for two reasons; because I was a foreigner and he liked to hear a different point of view on things, and because my intentions as a traveller were ‘genuine’; like him, I wanted to learn deeply about cultures and I did not walk around only taking pictures. Moreover, I felt that my previous experience and cultural capital as a backpacker enabled me to better understand the ‘backpacking culture’ that people were talking about, even though backpacking in China is not the same phenomenon as in the West. For example, knowledge and know-how regarding hostels, guidebooks like Lonely Planet and ‘road status’ – a social hierarchy among backpackers – helped me to frame my research data, while at the same time keeping in mind that my experiences where gained from a Western perspective.

Two of my questions asked what a backpacker was according to them, and also whether people thought there were any differences between Western and Chinese backpackers. Some answers that I got were that Western backpackers were ‘real’ backpackers, who understood the backpacking culture more than Chinese ones, and who were more adventurous. At other times, people talked about ‘you guys’, pointing at me when they were talking about Western people, which made it clear that they saw me as a non-Chinese ‘outsider’. The fact that people spoke positively about Western people, could be because they saw me as a representative of them and they wanted to be nice, or simply because they did not want to offend me.

On the other hand, there were also people who told me that Chinese backpackers were ‘more real’ than Western backpackers, because they thought Chinese people looked more for a authentic or local experience, or they said that they did not really see differences between Chinese and Western backpackers, but more between Chinese backpackers and Chinese tourists. Since I cannot know whether they said these things because they really thought so, or because they dare to tell something else, I think it is good to be sensitive towards these different reactions and take these possible ways of thinking due to my own position as a Western person into account when writing about this topic.

Chapter 1: Who is a backpacker, and who is not?

In the last twenty years, the Chinese government has introduced more holidays and has actively promoted tourism among the population as part of a ‘leisure culture campaign’ (Nyíri, 2006). In 1995, a two-day weekend was created for all workers (but rarely implemented in the country’s factories) and two years later two national holidays, National Day on October 1 and Labor Day on May 1, were extended to an entire week. This new policy resulted in a big boost of the Major newspapers promoted these holiday breaks as ‘golden consumer days’ or ‘golden travel holidays’, and big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai competed with each other for the highest consumption rates (Ngai, 2003).

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In recent years however, China has encountered a new wave of travellers: the independent travellers, who do not opt for packaged tours and highlights. I will use this relatively short chapter to explore the many different ideas that exist about backpackers in China. Part of this consists of media representations, and the way backpackers are covered by news media such as newspapers and television. Another part is popular media such as books and films, often made by backpackers themselves. All these channels tell a different story and represent backpackers in a different way. I argue that Chinese society holds an ambivalent attitude towards backpackers; they are portrayed as the adventurous pioneers of modern life, and at the same time as an undesirable object of suspicion. But what do backpackers themselves think is important to be a ‘real’ backpacker, and how is this image constituted? To answer these questions, I will conclude this chapter by looking into my informants own ideas about backpackers.

Influential media representations

Whenever one steps into a random bookstore in a Chinese city, it is hard to miss the shelves crammed with travel stories and traveller biographies. These books have gained a lot of popularity in a short time, and almost all the backpackers I talked with said to be were partly inspired by one of them. One example of a story that became popular in China is the one of Liu Chang and Gu Yue, two guys who hitchhiked from Beijing to Berlin and made a documentary series about it. Some of my informants told me that they actually got inspired to travel by this story.

Another example is the story of Hong Mei, who is supposedly ‘the first Chinese female to backpack across India’2 and who has written a book about her travel experiences as well: ‘The Further I Walk, the Closer I Get to Me’ (2014, 走得越远,离自己越近in Chinese). This title emphasizes the importance of ‘getting close to yourself’ while travelling, something that I will elaborate on in the next chapter.

Next to books, there are also popular television shows in which backpackers’ stories are highlighted. These could be documentary series, or talkshows in which backpackers are invited. It could be that many viewers who do not have the time, money or aspiration to travel independently themselves can still get a sense of ‘adventure’ when watching these shows.

Adjectives that are used to describe backpackers in the media would be ‘adventurous’, ‘courageous’ and ‘experimental’. One informant, Zhiqiang, who runs his own little bookshop in Dali, had ended up in the top three in the ‘Best Backpacker Awards’ of a Chinese outdoor magazine. What the exact criteria were for being a ‘good backpacker’ are unclear, but the three of them had in common that they had adopted a ‘rough’ travel style and went off the beaten track, using only public transport or bicycles.

2_{Francis, S. Interviewing Hong Mei: Roaming India on a Chinese Gap Year.}

http://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/traversing-indian-terrain-interview-with-chinese-travel-author-hong-mei/. (Retrieved on 4 April 2014).

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Critical voices

But there are also more critical voices about Chinese backpackers. Even though Chinese media themselves do not often write negatively about backpackers, such attitudes are sometimes implicitly heard in the public discourse. Every now and then, media report of groups of backpackers (usually ‘donkey friends’) who went out for mountaineering and got stuck, causing police and ambulances having to pick them up. About one of those incidents, one netizen comments: ‘They’re like flowers grown in a greenhouse. I’m from the countryside and I’ve climbed basically all kinds of mountains…’3

. This points out an important characteristic of Chinese backpackers: their urban background. All my informants were urban citizens, in the sense that they were born or had moved to big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu or Kunming. Even though some of them were born and raised in rural areas and small villages, they had enjoyed higher education or had been employed in (part-time) jobs in the city. This netizen implies that they are not used to any hardships, something that is more often said about the old-child-generation.

A news report in 2014 also sparked public outrage4: a 19-year-old girl offered sex with men in every city she would visit to fund her trip. She was labeled a prostitute and sex tourist after revealing her plans to hook up with these ‘temporary boyfriends’, while she herself said that ‘it is sort of like hitchhiking, it’s nothing to be ashamed of’. An element of reciprocity can be found here - albeit in a more extreme sense - which is significant for the backpacking culture (see: last chapter). In the Chinese film ‘Breakup Buddies’, backpacker enclave Dali is also depicted as a place with a different, loose moral, where one can easily pick up a one night stand. (‘But that’s not Dali’, one informant said indignantly. ‘That’s Lijiang, actually!’).

A final critical voice comes from many Chinese parents, who are not too happy when they hear that their only child wants to travel alone, far away from their hometown. One Confucian saying goes: ‘fumu zai, bu yuan you’: as long as your parents are alive, do not travel far. This is also why many people I spoke to told me that they lied to their parents about going to travel, and I will write more about the pressure that young Chinese people experience in the next chapter.

Ideas of who is a ‘real’ backpacker

We have seen several ways in which backpackers are portrayed. But what do backpackers themselves think about these images, and who is a ‘real’ backpacker according to them? Weiyuan, the 26-year-old boy who travelled and made money as a photographer, seemed to worry about my research and how I would represent backpackers. Several times, he told me that he could not stand for all backpackers, and that every backpacker has his own ideas and own style. Or, when I interviewed someone else, he would warn me: ‘But this is just one backpacker! Her story is not the same for all backpackers!’, and I would answer that that was why I wanted to interview as many people as possible. Maybe he was fed up with stereotypes about backpackers. When I asked him who was a real backpacker in his eyes, he said: ‘You

3

Lost college backpackers rescued, netizens angry. 27 April, 2011, http://www.chinahush.com/2011/04/07/lost-college-backpackers-rescued-netizens-angry/. (Retrieved on 19 May 2015).

4_{Chinese backpacker offers sex with man in each city she visits to fund trip. 28 October 2014.}

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don’t have to be a backpacker if you don’t want to. Some people do it to be different from other people. The only thing what makes real backpackers real, is the reason why they travel.’ One’s intentions should thus be pure and ‘real’. This also becomes clear when I asked other people about who a real backpacker was. Zhang, in her ethnographic dissertation about Chinese Donkey Friends (2008), emphasizes that having the right backpacking material and brands was very important for the people she spoke with. Only then could one be a ‘real backpacker’. This is not at all what I encountered, since the people I met did not care about brands at all. Intentions and experience were more important to be a real backpacker.

The identity of a backpacker is always defined in relation to the ‘mainstream tourist’. Even though there is not a real sense of identification and community among the backpackers, there is certainly a strong will to disassociate oneself from the mainstream Chinese tourists. These are the travelling Other; in Dali, you will see them in large groups, wearing comfortable sports shoes and headphones to listen to their tour guide, usually a woman dressed up in minority clothing who holds a stick or umbrella so that the tourists know which way to go. I got stuck in one of these groups once accidentally, which felt rather suffocating and it took a while before I finally got my way out of it. 34-year-old Wuzhou, who worked as a legal advisor in Chengdu, told me:

‘I hate organized tours. Very, very, very much. [It’s] not free and I used to join a group – it’s a Chinese group. To be very honest and direct, I feel a little bit embarrassed with the other members, because.. Too much noise. On the flight. It’s like a fight! So, I no longer join a group. […] I don’t like to be called ‘tourist’. Just call me traveller. I’m travelling, not touring.’

To him, being called a ‘tourist’ was the worst thing he could imagine. He took his pride in being a traveller and everything that was associated with it. Other ways in which people described a ‘real’ backpacker were balinghou (according to the people from the ‘80s), jiulinghou (according to the people from the ‘90s), not caring about other people’s opinion, for some people Western backpackers were real backpackers, while others stated Chinese were more ‘real’. This emphasis on authenticity will be highlighted in the next chapters, too. .

This young man had a sign that said: ‘So hungry. Lost my wallet when I wasn’t careful, [so I] try begging. With more than 10 yuan I can eat and take the bus. Thanks’. One of the people I interviewed later said that there are many people like this in Dali who are not backpackers at all, but simply try to mislead the people and get money.

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Conclusion

There is an interesting tension going on in the way Chinese backpackers are portrayed in media and popular discourse. On the one hand, backpackers are portrayed as courageous young people, the pioneers of a new form of travel among a new generation. Travel books and films have never been as popular as now, and many people are inspired by those adventurers.

On the other hand, backpackers are regarded with suspicion. Why do they refuse to work, to live a normal life? Why can’t they participate in Chinese market society, instead of engaging in ‘barter practices’ such as the Chinese girl did – a nightmare for Chinese parents. How are they ever going to take care of their parents, and will they ever be able to support society?

This ambivalence indicates an insecurity and moral panic when it comes down to the new backpacking trend. There is still the fear that young people will forget Chinese traditional values that give importance to the wellbeing of the collective like the family. Stories from Western travellers might have inspired Chinese people, and have perhaps created a base for backpacking popularity in China. The popular stories that I mentioned here could have been one motivation to start travelling. I will now deal with other motivations, that are both structural and personal.

Chapter 2: Motivations to travel

‘First, the thinking when I was travelling is – I want to go out to see, what are the people doing around China? What are they doing every day? You know, in China you are just born, and get education.’ It is the first week of my fieldwork, and I am sitting around a table in the hostel lounge with Yongliang (25) and Lili (21), who has just joined us. Both of them work in the hostel in Chengdu temporarily. Yongliang has just showed me his travel pictures and we are talking about why he started travelling. ‘From the moment you were born, you can see how your life will be’, Lili says. ‘We were born to study’. ‘Born to die!’ Yongliang adds, laughing. He can speak lightly about this subject now, because he knows this will not be the case for him anymore; even though his father wanted him to take over the family company, he refused and decided to go travelling. This has resulted in a fight between him and his dad that has been going on for two years now, but he has no regret.

In this chapter, I will explore the motivations of Chinese backpackers to go travelling. What makes Chinese travellers different from their Western counterparts, when it comes to travel motivations? In literature about Western backpackers, often-heard motivations are ‘learning more about other cultures’, ‘enhancing the self’ and ‘seeing the world before settling down’. If we look deeper into the social context in which Chinese backpackers find themselves, we will see that some motivations are similar, and others slightly different. I explore three key motivations to travel in this chapter. All of them are a combination of internal (personal, individual) motivations and external (social and cultural) factors for travelling. These do not at all stand apart from each other, but rather overlap; external structures could have been internalized and have become part of the personal and individual as well.

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The first motivation is the desire to find out more about the self. Like many young people worldwide, Chinese youth are struggling to find out who they actually are and what they want in life. Perhaps this feeling is even stronger in China, where young people get little opportunity to develop their own interests because of the country’s strict school system that does not allow much room for personal growth. The second motivation is to escape the continuous social and financial pressure and expectations that Chinese people have to deal with. I argue that during their youths, Chinese people experience high pressure from family and society to perform well, as well as to live a ‘normal life’, by which I mean the standard life trajectory that many Chinese parents have in mind for their child: studying, working and raising a family. Travel offers a temporary gateway to another world, outside the framework of normality.

Finally, travel shows people more of the world and the country they live in, something that urban citizens have often missed out on during their young years. Travelling around their own country shows them all kinds of lifestyles that are different from what they are used to. One of the reasons why young people often have not been able to explore the world is that their parents are, in their own eyes, overprotective. Being their only child, they receive all the attention from them which sometimes gives them a suffocating feeling. In the end, all motivations lead back to one main issue: confusion about the self. I will end the chapter by discussing the question whether these motivations indicate an increasing sense of individualism in China or not.

Finding out what you want: this time of life, in this time of society

One of my questions asked my informants to describe themselves in three words. I had included this question not because I wanted to get accurate descriptions of their characters, but more to allow a moment of self-reflection for my respondents. When I asked Yongliang this question, he thought for a while. ‘Rebellious (panni)’, he said. ‘Rebellious to what?’, I asked. ‘Against my family, and against traditionalism. Against the normal lifestyle’. For a second word, he chose ‘optimistic’, because ‘everything will be okay’. And finally, he chose ‘solitary’ (gudu), but later changed this into ‘lost’, and asked himself: ‘What will I be?’.

The words Yongliang mentioned were quite typical for the young people I met during my fieldwork. Other words that came up were free (ziyou) and independent (duli). It was not uncommon that people would think quietly for minutes, or decided that they could not answer this question because they felt they simple did not know themselves well enough.

Most people I spoke with were between 18 and 30 years old. Also in the Western world, this is the age around which people start to think about their identity, their selves and their future (Riley, 1988). In this sense, we could say that the confusion that Chinese young people experience is not surprising. However, I would like to add that the context of Chinese society reinforces this feeling to a certain extent. As stated in an earlier chapter, China has been through profound socio-economic changes during the last four decades. When I asked one girl what she thought was characteristic for the jiulinghou, the nineties-generation that is often described as ‘selfish’ in Chinese popular discourse, she said: ‘for jiulinghou, everything is possible’. In other words, these nineties and also eighties people are at the beginning of their ‘adult lives’, in a society that has only just opened itself up with endless possibilities and

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options. They are the pioneers of modern life; no-one has paved the way that will lead to security and happiness for them yet. The new generation has to find out for themselves.

This little signpost shows the way: ‘life’ can be found in Dali, the backpackers’ enclave in Yunnan.

Growing up: travelling as a ‘rite of passage’?

Perhaps academic literature on both Western and Chinese backpackers tends to focus too much on the ‘fun’ aspects of travelling. When I asked 22-year-old Baoyu why she liked to travel alone, she answered ‘Because we want to prove that we can live on our own, we’re adults… to some extent’. During my research, it appeared that more people tried out backpacking because they felt the need to ‘grow up’. Qingshan, a 22-year-old boy who worked in a hostel in Chengdu, said:

‘[I travelled to] Funhuang. It’s in Hulan province. By myself. Alone. It’s very boring, I think. Because I’m not… I always go out with my friends. But when I go to Hulan, I think maybe, I want to try. And go some place alone. But honestly, I think it’s very boring. I think travelling alone is very wenyi [literary and artistic]. A very particular way. For me. Because I don’t have any experience.’

When I asked if he probably would not do it again, he said:

‘No, no! I want to try again. Because when I… Last time I travelled, I was about 18 years old, and I’m not.. That time is too young, I think. […] I’m not… Grown up [at that time], haha. Yeah, I think I’m not grown up, so maybe I want to try again. To travel alone.’

Clearly, this boy did not really enjoy travelling alone, but he felt that he needed to do it. Most people liked travelling on their own, because they did not have to take others’ wishes in account; they could do whatever they like, whenever they wanted. Other people simply felt more comfortable with travelling alone, because they were used to being on their own and had

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to learn to be independent from a young age, for example because they rarely saw their parents, who worked in factories outside their town when they were little – a very common situation in China (Wen and Lin, 2012). Chaoxing told me about her youth, which had not always been easy:

‘When I was 12, my father betrayed my mother, and my mother is not an open-minded woman, she cannot work out the things. [They] destroyed each other and no-one cares about me, so I didn’t feel that… When I was 12, I know that I need to be strong, I need to be independent, I need to take care of myself.’

A lot of people felt they had not grown up yet. On the one hand, growing up was something most of them desired and hoped to achieve through travel. But what is telling, is that being immature was also associated with purity and authenticity. Yuanjun, a 32-year-old male who was currently unemployed and travelling through China, told me:

‘I don’t want to be a mature person, actually. Maturity… Probably it’s not a great thing. […] I think immature people, they… Would be more real, more cute, I think. What you are thinking, what you are behaving, it’s more adorable. Immature people. I think it’s more real, it’s irrational sometimes. I would say it’s irrational, sometimes I feel it’s more pure […].’

We have just seen how growing up can be one of the motivations to go backpacking, but since Chinese backpackers are often looking for a simple and authentic life, this immaturity is also desirable because it is perceived to be pure and ‘real’. This also implies indirectly that minorities such as the Tibetans, which are considered to be ‘pure’, may be thought of as immature, and ‘not as mature as Han people’. I will go deeper into the perceptions of minorities in the next chapter.

We can now use Arnold van Gennep’s idea of ‘rite of passage’ (1909) – almost an archetype now for analysing case studies about travel. Previously, there has been some critique on this theory in relation to travel, for example by Wilson and Richards (2008), who argue that the familiarity of backpackers’ enclaves problematises the concept of rite of passage, since there is no substantial shift between home and away. But perhaps the point is not whether an environment or place really differs from the home base or not, but more about having the feeling or idea of it being different. After all, romanticising and idealising is inherently part of the fun of travelling for many people. Drawing on my own research, there are a few points that I would like to add to the idea of travel as a rite of passage.

First of all, Chinese backpackers might use travel indeed as a rite of passage in the sense that travelling helps them becoming independent, grow up, strengthen or even harden them. But in a Chinese context, it can actually help them to steer their ‘self transformation’ in a certain direction; if they would not travel, they would become mature in a society which is allegedly highly consumerist and superficial. Travelling not only brings them into contact with what are said to be ‘pure and authentic’ places, but also allows them to become pure and authentic themselves or, if we think about the analogy of the immature but ‘real’ person, becoming mature while retaining their purity.

Secondly, it is hard to speak of a sense of ‘communitas’ (Turner, 1967) since there is not much of a travel community among Chinese backpackers; people meet and part

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continuously and all contacts are of a temporary nature. And finally, as we will see later, the phase of ‘re-incorporation’ into society has not at all been enabled through travelling but has actually become harder. The rite of passage, as we thus can call it to a certain extent, has led travellers into a different adulthood than is expected from them and what most of their peers have experienced and I will explore this into more detail in the final chapter.

Escaping pressure and high expectations

Another motivation for young Chinese people is to travel is to escape the pressures that are put onto them by family and society. This push factor forms, to some extent, a motivation for Western backpackers as well. They want to get away from everyday responsibilities such as work and study (Cohen, 2011 and Maoz, 2007), albeit perhaps in a ‘lighter’ form than their Chinese counterparts.

There are two main ‘topics’ about which Chinese young people feel significant pressure from family. The first one is a pressure to perform: to get high grades in school and university, and to get a prestigious and well-paid job after that. In this case, the pressure is about a quantitative scale with which performances can be measured; high grades and salaries provide a measurable status. At the same time, this pressure is a tool to ensure that people will get a good living. Whereas only a few decades ago, China went through an intense period of hunger and poverty, people are now encouraged to work as hard as they can, which seems to be a guaranteed way to survival and success in this particular time in China. The parents of young people, who can vividly remember these hardships, are especially looking for safety and security, while their children seek the thrill in travel adventures.

An interesting anomaly is Yingjie, the only ‘donkey friend’ that I interviewed during my research. Whereas most backpackers that I spoke to wanted to be independent and free to go where they wanted, he chose to make trips with a Donkey Friend group that was led by a guide. When I asked how he would navigate on trips, he said ‘I just follow the guide! He has the compass. [And] the guide will tell us where we’ll go next, and the next week we go there. And he will choose a trip. Yeah, I think that’s convenient for me.’ He was in his thirties, slightly older than most of my respondents, had a wife and worked in a full-time position – perhaps all indicating that he preferred security above adventure.

An important factor that contributes to the pressure that young Chinese people have to go through is the educational system. High school in particular is infamous for its college entrance exam, the gaokao. This final exam determines which kind of higher education the students can follow, and indirectly ascribes a future job to them. During their period in high school, which usually takes three years, students devote all their time preparing for this test and have classes that can start as early as 7 a.m. until 5 p.m, after which they still have to do their homework or even attend ‘evening school’. Emphasis lies on memorizing facts and studying vocabulary, rather than practical objects such as applying knowledge and communicating with language. Once at college or university, people can relax more and have more free time.

Many respondents described this time as a very stressful one. Shirong, a 28-year-old aeronautical engineer in Beijing who nicknamed himself ‘Freedom Robinson’ after adventurous protagonist Robinson Crusoe, told me: ‘The teenagers […], they get a so boring ten years. They cannot have spare time to go to the library. To read the book, and to see the

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map, to go around their town, their city. I think it’s so hard to participate in society’s activities. I think in your country, your Western world, [you] pay more attention to this, to develop a person’s self thinking.’ And when I asked Wuzhou, the 34-year-old traveller who currently worked as a legal adviser in Chengdu, whether he had experienced much pressure during high school, he said: ‘Yeah. Like today, that thing never changes. That’s something that remains all the time. Their [today’s high school students] high school time is a disaster. But they don’t feel so. It’s just because they don’t have comparison. Once they go to America, then, when they look back, they will think, what’s that shit?’

Especially in Chengdu, people said they felt confused about their futures. Now that they had finished their gaokao, and had sometimes graduated from university already, they were confused about which direction to go with their lives. For many years, there was one big goal in their life: studying in order to get the highest possible grade. Now that that goal, as insignificant and simple as it was, had been accomplished, there was suddenly a black hole that left people with a feeling of meaninglessness in their lives. Some people deliberately looked for other kinds of goals, things they could achieve within a certain time frame, just to feel they ‘got somewhere’. Qingshan, the boy who had been backpacking because he felt the need to grow up, told me: ‘[I want] to start my own business so I can… I want to have a goal. A destination. [So] I can do something to achieve my goal and make myself better. If I have a goal, I have power to achieve it, so…’. He paused. ‘And right now, you don’t really have a goal. How does that make you feel?’, I asked. He thought for a while. ‘Very confused’, he answered. ‘It’s like you walk at a cross[road], and you don’t know which way you want to choose’.

Xueyou, the guesthouse owner with whom I started this chapter, also said that he preferred to plan ahead for short periods of time: ‘I really don’t know what will be in five years. Five years ago, we never know that the way we communicate [is] so different. […] The goal, or the dream that I set today is maybe not suitable for five years, but at least I set like, specific tasks for every year, and I try to do my best to accomplish it.’ A society like China is changing fast in many ways, and setting small goals like Xueyou does offers a sense of security and control over a situation; whether he succeeds or not totally depends on him. In this sense, it can be a certain defence mechanism to protect oneself in such an uncertain society. Who knows what the economic situation will be like in five or ten years? Like Xueyou indicates, it might be not worth it to prepare for something for such a long term.

Apart from the pressure to work hard, there is something else: the expectation to live a normal life. This second expectation is however a much more cultural and normative one. Xianliang, the 27-year-old boy who had given up his job in the financial sector, said: ‘I told my mom that, if… Yeah, I wish I can stay, just in the mountain and become a monk. But my mother refused. My mother doesn’t want me to do something like that’. ‘Why not?’, I ask and all of a sudden, he looks a bit sad and helpless. ‘My mother still wants me to become a regular person. Have a career, get a family and do something like this.’ He was able to reflect critically on this because of this travel experiences, that were so very different from the life he lived before when he was working with the bank.

Theoretically, this feeling of freedom that younger generations in China experience is very big; even though families exert pressure on their little emperors regarding study and career, their future life trajectories are eventually still in their own hands. Especially now that

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the stories of people who freely quit their jobs and travel around receive a lot of media attention, the idea of simply running away from family expectations seems to become a more and more feasible option. But in practice, it is not simple at all to escape from the family. While travelling may offer a temporary solution and a time of less intensive contact with the home front, few people want to give up this relationship altogether.

Even if parents do not explicitly put pressure on their child, many people still feel it is their duty to care for them. This internalized pressure is embedded in Confucian notions about familial relationships. Shirong, the 28-year-old engineer, told me: ‘I want my parents to have a stable life. Now they rent [a house], they do not enjoy. I have to buy a house for my parents and go back.’ ‘Back to where?’, I asked confused, and he replied: ‘Back to my life. Frankly, I just live for others’. So whereas people tend to make more and more decisions regarding their own life trajectories, such as choosing to travel without family and refusing to be employed in a ‘regular’ job, it seems that an individual life is a dream that can hardly ever be achieved in the end: balinghou and jiulinghou generations will often still feel a pressure to sacrifice at least part of their lives to their family.

Seeing more of China and the world beyond ‘home’

A final motivation to travel is to escape the familiarity of the own environment. Like Yongliang, many young people who grew up in urban areas have no idea what people’s lives in the rest of country look like. The educational system described above contributes to this, but there is another factor that plays a role in the ‘unworldliness’ of young Chinese people: the one child policy has turned parents into overprotective beings who ensure that their children don’t lack anything, but also have strong ideas about what their children can and cannot do (Mori et al., 2012: 19). In this sense, travelling (is related to rite of passage). Backpacking alone would, especially for girls, be too dangerous in the eyes of many parents, who had read horror stories about travellers who had become the victim of rape and violence in China. Some people would therefore lie to their parents, and told them that they would travel together with a friend instead of alone, or did not tell them that they were planning to travel at all.

Many Chinese backpackers are domestic travellers, something that is rather uncommon for Western backpackers. Many informants stated that they liked travelling around in China, because there were many parts within the country that they had never seen, it was affordable and they felt comfortable with the language. While talking about how to get away from the overprotective environment at home, many people spoke enthusiastically about the ethnic minorities that they could visit during their travels. When I talked about this with 27-year-old Chuhua, who I remember as a very tall, freckled girl that laughed a lot, she said:

‘Tibet is very different. Very, very different. […] Han-people, you know… [They] work in a different job, even they are boss, like they open a company, advertisement company, or a movie, or a driver - they are the same, they stand there the same, they doesn’t have nice clothes, and wearing very ugly shoes.’

Chuhua describes Han people here as boring, ‘all the same’ and even unfashionable. Other people, who were also Han people themselves, described Han as ‘superficial’, ‘not kind’ and ‘less natural than Tibetans’. The idea of the ‘boring Han’ is not new; Han Chinese are often

A different ‘Chinese dream’ : perceptions of individualism, consumerism and life trajectories among young Chinese backpackers