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Chinese Tour Psychology To Group Or Not to Group, June 1983 The main advantage of traveling in an organized tour is that you are relieved of tending to the many details of getting from hotel room to hotel room. Some would argue that an even greater advantage is the added conversational opportunities, but there is less agreement about that than of avoiding hotel clerks and ticket agents.
The chief disadvantage of these highly organized middle class excursions to unfamiliar places is lack of flexibility. That means that you can’t return to “go” once you have begun. No skipping the morning trip to the world’s smallest waterfall or opting out of lunch at the floating gardens of Lake Stenchmoor. For all practical purposes, when you join a group tour, you give up your rights of decision to some unknown but omniscient being, otherwise known as a tour wholesaler, and his band of ever-smiling angels, referred to in the trade as tour guides. All of this is a well established fact; and when one goes on packaged tours, one knows what to expect.
After considering all sides, or at least as many as we could identify of to group or not to group, we usually opt for the freedom of the free spirit. There are exceptions, however, and these involve lacking the prerequisite skills called for by a particular journey and not having sufficient time to make uninformed, dumb decisions. Traveling in Asia seemed a situation calling for an exception, so we joined small groups of tourists.
With the opening of formerly forbidden foreign countries new mutants of group tours have appeared. One deserving a special heed is the China Tour. The China Tour goes beyond even the tight regimentation of the Russia Tour. The China Tour, even in the few years since R. Nixon took the first, has developed a psychology of its own. The People’s Tour Committee of China (there must be one) has two objectives. Fortunately for the tour taker, the first is letting you into China. That seems straightforward enough, until their second objective becomes clear; namely, that the Committee really does not want you to see very much of China. Thus, there is the interesting problem of how to bring hundreds of thousands of foreign devils into China each year without letting them visit with the Chinese. The underlying psychology of their solution is clever and simple. Essentially, it is to condition you to expect nothing, so that you will then be immensely thankful for whatever little they do deliver. A simple idea which takes some imagination to implement. It is much like the old prisoner psychology gag in which the convict thanks the warden for breaking only the fingers on his right hand.
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