On the river
'On the river', is a photographic project realized on the Li River, Guangxi, China. The photos describes a typical touristic day journey in one of the most popular destination in the South of China. If between 1949 and 1976 under the chairman Mao Zedong, leisure travel was considered a capitalistic bourgeois activity and therefore forbidden under Marxian principles. (…) Successively, contrary to Maoist ideology, Deng Xiaoping saw the monetary potential in tourism and began to promote it intensely. In 1978, an estimated 1.8 million tourists entered the country. (…) During the 1990s, the Chinese central government also issued several policies to encourage the Chinese to travel domestically, as a means of stimulating consumption. (…) In 1999, over 700 million trips were made by domestic tourists. (…) Since reform, China's tourism industry has registered consistent growth year-after-year. (Ping Zhou, 2012). In the last 15 years domestic tourism in China is greatly expanding. The National Bureau of Statistics of China announced on February 22 that the number of Chinese resident traveling in 2012 has increased to 2.96 billion person-times, with a year-on-year growth rate of 12.1 percent. The revenue of domestic tourism has increased by 17.6 percent to 2,270.6 billion yuan. (Ling-en Wang 2013) At the moment, the aim of the Government is to develop and improve quickly the service sector. To realize this goal, the government plan on taking a series of measures, including stepping up tourism promotion, develop more leisure facilities, and reduce air pollution. Premier Zhu Rongji stressed that the development of the service sector should be sped up, and more efforts should be given to the service industries directly related to resident consumption (Zhu 2001,). (…) Therefore, more preferential government policies have been, or will be, worked out to support tourism development at both central and local levels. For example, the central government has increased public holidays, and purposely made three weeklong holidays per year to give residents more leisure time. (Alan A. Lew, 2012) Ref: -Rural tourism development in China: Principles, models and the future (2013) Ling-en Wang, Sheng-kui Cheng, Lin-sheng Zhong, Song-lin Mu, Bijaya G. C. Dhruba, Guo-zhu Ren -Tourism Development in China, the Growth of Tourism in China. (2012) Ping Zhou -Tourism in China (2003) Alan A. Lew, Lawrence Yu, John Ap, Zhang Guangrui