Walking the Ancient Tea Horse Road: The Rise of the Outdoors and China’s First Long Distance Branded Hiking Trail

Having made the transition from a life-time acquired skill to something acquired by the casual tourist through a professional operator, outdoor ‘adventure’ tourism is now one of the fastest growing sectors. After having experienced the initial stages of the development of mass tourism, the tourism market in China is undergoing a period of significant diversification in which outdoor adventure tourism in the form of hiking is also a key growth area. In China the hikers, known as ‘donkey friends’, are growing in numbers and exploring new destinations to engage in short and long distance treks. As a result, whilst outdoor adventure tourism presents itself as a valuable opportunity, its development is constrained by the lack of adequate planning, management and infrastructure, and by the potential negative impacts of overcapacity on fragile ecosystems. In this paper we argue that the Ancient Tea Horse Road (ATHR) – a series of ancient trade and administrative networks criss-crossing Southwest China – could prove to be an excellent foundation for creating a world class hiking infrastructure and a hiking trail that as a brand could attract many domestic and international hikers. It is also a tool for ‘thinking out loud’ the challenges and opportunities that such a proposal presents in the Chinese context thereby giving insights into broader trends in outdoor tourism

Middle kingdom mentalities: Chinese visions of national characteristics in the 1990's

© 2008 IngentaChina has a venerable tradition of intellectual concern with the welfare of the country and its people - youmin youguo. The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed something of a revival in writing on the future prospects and hopes of the Chinese nation. At the beginning of the new millennium, Chinese intellectuals are heralding the dawn of a 'Chinese century'. The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary analysis of this emerging body of literature. We will attempt to outline the general parameters of the 'Middle Kingdom Mentality'. Key terms in this discourse, such as 'zhongguo', 'minzu', 'wenming', and 'wenhua', will be examined in relation to their significance in the overall discourse. We will argue that this discourse is an extension of the 'Chinese Enlightenment', an ongoing reaction to colonial discourse and the 'challenges' of modernity. By analysing these texts we are able to gather a sense of what, in the minds of intellectuals and officials, a modern twenty-first century China may be like

‘Reading and Interpreting Brecht’ – Q&A with Director Dr Wang Xiaoying

Invited panelis

Spoken and written register variation in Spanish: a multi-dimensional analysis

There have been few comprehensive analyses of register variation conducted in a European language other than English. Spanish provides an ideal test case for such a study: Spanish is a major international language with a long social history of literacy, and it is a Romance language, with interesting linguistic similarities to, and differences from, English. The present study uses Multi-Dimensional (MD) analysis to investigate the distribution of a large set of linguistic features in a wide range of spoken and written registers: 146 linguistic features in a twenty-million words corpus taken from nineteen spoken and written registers. Six primary dimensions of variation are identified and interpreted in linguistic and functional terms. Some of these dimensions are specialised, without obvious counterparts in the MD analyses of other languages (e.g., a dimension related to discourse with a counterfactual focus). However, other Spanish dimensions correspond closely to dimensions identified for other languages, reflecting functional considerations such as interactiveness, personal stance, informational density, argumentation, and a narrative focus