Official Party media coverage of domestic tourism during this year’s week-long National Day holiday took a particular focus: sites associated with the Long March (长征), the 10,000-kilometer retreat of China’s early Communists from southern Jiangxi to northern Shaanxi during the Chinese Civil War. 

This year marks 90 years since the “Victory of the Long March of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army,” as the Party refers to the anniversary events, or the conclusion of the Long March in October 1936. In observance of the anniversary, the Party-state has made a concerted effort to promote a renewed connection to this “red lineage” by pushing patriotic education across mediums, from themed films, TV dramas and documentaries to new opportunities for travel and leisure along the Long March route. 

The robust push to remember the Long March is part of a familiar campaign: “red tourism” (红色旅游), China’s official promotion of sites foundational to the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China. Because the Long March is one of the country’s core narratives, both central and local governments have dedicated significant resources to driving “Long March” tourism, from themed high-speed train journeys between revolutionary base sites, to revolutionary study tour routes that offer visitors “a personal experience of the hardships of the Long March,” to an AI-powered immersive Long March Culture Digital Art Museum in Guiyang. This year, a slate of new films and television dramas shot on location along the Long March route has also, according to media reports, driven a significant tourism boost to filming locations.

As Horng-Luen Wang of Taiwan’s national academy, Academia Sinica, observes, “red tourism” is not merely patriotic state propaganda. Its purposes are at once political, cultural, and economic, and it serves as an important vehicle for China’s national identity construction during the reform era — ensuring that nation and Party are inextricably linked. 

“Red tourism” first emerged as an official initiative with the release of the “2004–2010 National Red Tourism Development Plan Outline” by the National Development and Reform Commission. It describes four “benefits” of “red tourism” as follows:

Improving “patriotic education” had been an important priority for the CCP in the 1990s. A buildup of public distrust in the wake of the dramatic transition from Marxism-Leninism to Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms under the thinly veiled moniker of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” exploded in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. In the aftermath, the Party responded with nationalist campaigns as a unifying force in the absence of consistent socialist ideology, transforming the revolutionary history of the previous decades into the “culture and heritage” of the Chinese people. In the Xi Jinping era, this concept was distilled in the phrase “red genes” (红色基因), which suggests the history and heritage of the CCP is part of the deeper cellular structure of what it means to be Chinese.

“Red tourism” has helped cultivate and maintain this national vision as subsequent leaders have pushed forward economic development and modernization, while also bringing business and development to “old revolutionary areas,” many of which were rural and poor. Local governments have poured hundreds of millions of yuan into these projects, which involve not only the construction of museums, monuments, and heritage sites, but also the development of tourism infrastructure including roads, hotels, and ample public transportation.

“Red tourism” has seen a renewed push under Xi Jinping, who, since the beginning of his tenure as General Secretary of the CCP in 2012, has overseen a massive shift of power away from government ministries and toward central Party bodies. Important to this shift was a greater emphasis on patriotic education, which, for Xi, goes hand in hand with red tourism. “Red base areas and patriotic education are one concept. Developing red tourism is another. The two must be coordinated,” Xi emphasized during a December 2012 tour of Hebei Province. 

The initial development plan for “red tourism” carried the lofty goal of developing 100 “red tourism classic scenic areas” (红色旅游经典景区), with 50 of those receiving more than 500,000 visitors per year by 2007 and 80 reaching that same number by 2010. Today, China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism counts 300 national-level “red tourism classic scenic area” sites across China, in every province including Tibet. 

But this figure hardly gives a complete picture of the initiative’s current scale. Beijing alone claims 130 red tourism sites, with six new ones added this year (including city districts such as Chaoyang). In 2019, the CCP Central Committee and the State Council embarked on an ambitious plan to construct a “Long March National Cultural Park” spanning 15 provinces, aimed as much at “driving development along the route” as at inheriting the “spirit” (精神) of the Long March and “telling the Long March story well.” Under Xi, “red tourism” has also turned its attention abroad, sparking joint exhibitions and tourism exchanges with countries that have overlapping revolutionary histories such as Vietnam and Russia. As one People’s Daily article this summer remarked, “red tourism is in its prime” (红色旅游 “正青春”).

The “red tourism” experience in China today can often feel contradictory and ironic for obvious reasons. As a graduate student in China, I visited many of these sites, often adorned with grandiose digital displays of the national flag and sprawling red block quotes espousing Party values and Mao Zedong quotations. I remember exiting the museum of the First National Congress of the CCP in Shanghai — which lets you out directly in front of a luxury shopping mall — and picking up collectible plates with Mao’s face on them at Yan’an gift shops, and thinking, “So this is what socialism has wrought?”

To today’s CCP, though, there is no contradiction in this commodification of the CCP’s legacy. To be able to travel leisurely and consume widely — to take a high-speed train from Jiangxi to Shaanxi — is a testament to the success of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” It is also precisely the purpose of “red tourism,” fulfilling one of the initiative’s original goals. As a People’s Daily commentary put it back in 2004:

Red tourism is both a conceptual innovation and an industrial innovation. The development of red tourism will help explore a virtuous cycle in which, under the socialist market economy, social benefits and economic benefits are well integrated, spiritual wealth is transformed into social wealth. Together, they are of benefit to the society and the people.