Abstract

"Please Take Over Our Company: China Travel Service in the Era of “New Democracy” (1949-1954)"

Gavin Healy, University of Michigan (gh148@columbia.edu)

This paper chronicles the struggle of China’s first modern travel agency, China Travel Service, to reinvent itself after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Following nationwide expansion during the 1920s and 1930s, the agency was deeply affected by years of Japanese occupation and civil war. After 1949, it sought to revise its business model for the altered political order. In the early 1950s, the agency saw conversion into a joint state-private enterprise as its only hope for survival in the new socialist economy, and engaged in protracted discussions with government officials to realize this goal. Yet even in this period when the state was courting capitalists for their financial resources and expertise, officials tasked with investigating the agency concluded it would be better to establish an entirely new state tourism bureau, China International Travel Service. Breaking with scholarship that casts the ultimate dissolution of China Travel Service in 1954 as a failure to adapt to the political realities of the new era, I conclude instead that the new government’s decision to abandon the agency was based on practical economic factors rather than ideological ones. Through close reading of the agency’s magazine and travel guides, and extensive research of the records of the agency housed in the Shanghai Municipal Archives, I chart the exhaustive, but ultimately vain attempt of agency personnel to transform China Travel Service from a capitalist enterprise to a socialist one.