Travel and Social Media in China: From Transit Hubs to Stardom

Abstract

This paper investigates how the concept of self-organized travel in China is shaped by travellers' engagement with social media. The investigation reveals some of the dynamics behind travel-related postings on the Internet and how the understanding of the Chinese traveller is deepened. The article is intentionally descriptive, and it presupposes two things. First, that an evolvement towards a more advance and sophisticated level of Internet use in China starts around the millennium, and second, that the Chinese reform period had not existed for more than a few years before short distance self-organized travelling within the larger cities became very popular. This form of travelling was often in small groups and centred around local transit hubs. Locals with knowledge about a certain area became self-appointed tour organizers and a self-organized travel phenomenon slowly emerged. This article uses a famous trial from 2006 to exemplify how the bulletin board system (BBS) played a decisive role in creating self-organized travel in China and thus describes how Chinese self-organized travel developed on the Internet. By proving a link between the BBS and self-organized travelling the groundwork is laid for describing how social media and self-organized travel are related. The article follows the concept of donkey friends to show that postings on a BBS were a premature form of social media postings and that the period between the first BBS travel postings and the first Sina blogs can be classified as the origin of an Internet-based travel community in China. The users of these blogs and BBS developed into celebrities who excelled in self-organized travel. They used travelling as a way to distinguish themselves from other bloggers. The article then investigates how social media is used to promote travelling by different agents in the travel market. Again the trendsetting bloggers provide a link between promotion and social media. There will be a short introduction of the statistics on Chinese social media and a prediction of future trends followed by some concluding remarks.