China Traditonal Tourism

By china tour on 2009-6-16 7:08:00 | China Travel News

If a person traveled from one city to another within the same province, he had to first get special food coupons for food in the visited city, besides paying for transportation and accommodation,hotels. Traveling outside a province took different food coupons. Those classified as farmers faced even greater hurdles, because farmers were completely banned fromChina Traveling to urban regions in general.
Checking into a hotel required an employer's introduction letter. Even this could not get you a room in the nicest hotels, which were reserved for high-ranking bureaucrats. Each and every citizen, including poets, teachers, dancers, business executives and even monks, as well as all organizations, were given a bureaucratic ranking by the government.

Even the top manager at a small company was not allowed to stay at a nice hotel or take a first-class train, because under this system, his company's bureaucratic ranking, hence his ranking, was not high enough for that.
Ironically, many good-quality hotels and resorts were underused during the Maoist period, because even if there were not enough qualified officials requesting accommodation, the hotels were not allowed to sell the rooms to other people.
Such rules have gradually been lifted in the reform era. For example, by 1991, the government stopped requiring domestic travelers to show their bureaucratic ranking to take a first-class train to travel China. But there were massive socioeconomic forces behind the rule changes.