The discourse of travel, society, and nation in Republican China

Abstract In the late 1920s and the 1930s a fully developed discourse emerged in China that linked either travel as a general concept (mostly with a primary focus on its leisure form) or tourism more specifically to the interests of society and the nation. This article analyses its development as it evolved in the first half of the twentieth century. For this purpose, it first probes into the discourse that surrounded, from the 1920s onwards, the constitution and the activity of the Travel Department of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank and of the China Travel Service, in line with which the travel service that one and the other provided was considered to involve dimensions of service to the nation and to society. The article proceeds by looking into two separate but ultimately linked lines of discourse that came to full bloom during the Nanjing decade and after: one that linked travel to the building of society, and another that linked it to the strengthening of the nation.