Up the Yangtze, tourism & a new indentured class

Heather and I went yesterday and saw the documentary Up the Yangtze. I thoroughly enjoyed it (and you can find out more about the film, if you’re interested) and was equally disturbed by it–not the movie itself, but the subtext. Thumbnail sketch: China has opened up to Western Tourism, and Western Tourists are interested in visiting China. The set-up for the documentary is that tourists are traveling up the Yangtze River to see it before the Three Gorges Dam swallows up all the scenery (which has to be a weird kind of ecological and cultural rubbernecking). They travel on cruise ships–which are floating islands of North America.

The subtext that I took away from the movie was the impact–and in my opinion, an exceedingly negative one–of North American tourism on the global south. The film has scene after scene of cringe-worthy training for those Chinese working on the ships. All employees of the cruise line get new names (for example, the protagonist, Yu Shui’s tourism-friendly name is Cindy), are told what topics to avoid with paying customers (Canadians don’t want to talk about Quebec independence) and how to act (not to be too apologetic because it will come off as insincere to North Americans).

All of this points to the underlying power-imbalance that seems to be at the heart of this kind of travel. And I can’t help but think that those working “for” North Americans, be they on Chinese Cruise Ships or at Mexican All-Inclusive Resorts, are a new class of indentured workers. Rather than being under contract to a North American tourist, as in a classic understanding of an indentured worker, they are under “contract” to this particular system of tourism. The system and the network has such power that it is reified and seemingly, has the ability to interess those with less power in the system–in this case, power seems to center on money. It really hit home because of my recent trip to Peru–Heather leaned over to me at one point in the film, as some white North Americans are excitingly “visiting” a Three River’s Gorge Dam relocatee’s home and asked “Was this us?” I couldn’t help but wonder how I was implicated in the film’s subtext, too.

A key question in one’s own travel practices seems to be “How does one travel without creating this indentured class?” I’m going to reflect on and try and answer that.