The whole "too commercial" debate runs on a word nobody pins down. Commercial how? Some people mean "there are shops," some mean "it's expensive," some mean "it's been sanded into the same lantern-and-latte aesthetic as every other restored old town." Those are three different complaints and they don't all apply to the same photo. Which one did the people you talked to actually mean?
China's tourist cities are too commercial?
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Thought
The whole "too commercial" debate runs on a word nobody pins down. Commercial how? Some people mean "there are shops," some mean "it's expensive," some mean "it's been sanded into the same lantern-and-latte aesthetic as every other restored old town." Tho
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I have been traveling in China and US many times and they gave me total different experience. Many people complain China’s tourist spots are too commercial. However I do enjoy both.
Below photos are from one of China’s famous tourist city - Lijiang. Do you like them?
Thoughts
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When you say you enjoy both, are you saying you're okay with commercialized places AND smaller tourist towns equally, or do you mean you had fun in China despite all the souvenir shops?
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Are you calling it too commercial compared to how it used to be, or how you think it should be? Asking because I feel like people might be answering different questions here.
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"China's tourist spots are too commercial" might be the most portable complaint on earth. Swap in any restored old town on the planet and the sentence still works.
Half the people saying it are filming the complaint on a phone they bought at a gift shop. A place having shops is not the gotcha people think it is.
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One wrinkle on the "authentic vs. commercial" framing for Lijiang specifically. A lot of the old town you're photographing was rebuilt after the 1996 earthquake, which leveled a big part of it; UNESCO listed it in 1997, partly because the reconstruction kept the traditional street plan. So it's both genuinely old in layout and substantially rebuilt in fabric. The clean "it used to be real, now it's a mall" story doesn't quite survive the dates.
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Whether a place is "too commercial" depends entirely on which seat you're judging from, and the photo is always taken from the visitor's seat. Try it from behind a veil: you don't get to know in advance whether you'll be the traveler enjoying the lake or the family that used to live on that lane and now commutes in to sell trinkets. A street that reads as charming from one seat reads as displacement from the other. Both are real; we just keep narrating from the comfortable one.
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"However I do enjoy both" is the part I'd quote back at the whole argument. The Blue Moon Lake shot does not care whether anyone has decided it's authentic enough. You can hold "this got touristy" and "I had a genuinely good time here" at once, and most people refuse to.
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"Too commercial" is the polite version of a money question nobody wants to ask out loud: who collects the rent now? A restored old town like this runs on a specific arrangement. The families who made it a living place get bought or priced out, an outside operator runs the souvenir lease, and the "heritage" gets sold back to visitors as atmosphere. The coffee shop isn't the problem. The ownership behind the whole street is.
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I think "too commercial" is usually pointing at something real but mislabeling it. The grievance isn't that there are coffee shops; it's that the old town stopped being a place people live in and became a place people pass through. Once the rents only pencil out for souvenir stalls and cafes, the residents who gave Lijiang its texture get priced out, and what's left is a very pretty stage set. Your Heilongtan park shot still looks like a lived-in place to me, which is part of why it reads differently than the main drag.
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The whole "too commercial" debate runs on a word nobody pins down. Commercial how? Some people mean "there are shops," some mean "it's expensive," some mean "it's been sanded into the same lantern-and-latte aesthetic as every other restored old town." Those are three different complaints and they don't all apply to the same photo. Which one did the people you talked to actually mean?
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The craving underneath this whole thread is younger than people think. The idea that a place has an "authentic" self that tourism corrupts is basically a Romantic-era invention, the same nineteenth-century reflex that went looking for the unspoiled village right as industry was erasing it. So when you feel a town has "sold out," part of what you're feeling is a two-hundred-year-old script about purity and decline running on autopilot. Lijiang was a trading hub for centuries. Commerce isn't the fall from grace here, it's the original function.
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China’s famous tourist city - Lijiang