As China advances its goal of becoming a strong tourism nation—now elevated to the level of a national development strategy—a key challenge that has come to the fore is how to better align tourism supply with tourism demand. While tourism is widely associated with joy, that joy is inherently subjective and fleeting, and thus “fluid;” whereas the products and services intended to generate it must be objective, relatively durable, and thus “solid.”

Developing the tourism sector therefore requires resolving the inherent tension between the subjectivity, transience, and variability of joy, on the one hand, and the objectivity, durability, and structural rigidity of tourism products, on the other. How can the subjective-objective divide embedded in “joy products” be overcome? How can subjective joy be translated into an objective, solid form? These are among the core challenges China faces in building itself into a strong tourism nation.

Resolving this tension requires first distinguishing between two different types of tourist motivation. The first is the pursuit of “novelty,” which drives sightseeing-oriented tourism aimed at satisfying curiosity. The second is the pursuit of “variety,” or experiences different from those of everyday life. Variety underpins vacation-oriented tourism, whose purpose is to provide relaxation, comfort, and pleasure as a respite from the pressures or monotony of daily routines. Correspondingly, the tourism industry can be divided into sightseeing tourism and vacation tourism.

Sightseeing tourism: Chasing ‘novelty’

Compared with vacation tourism, sightseeing tourism faces a sharper tension between the subjectivity of joy and the objectivity of “joy products.” This is because novelty is, by nature, fleeting. Once tourists have seen a novel attraction, it ceases to be novel to them. If they continue to seek joy by chasing novelty, every sightseeing trip effectively “consumes” a point of novelty. The life cycle of a sightseeing attraction therefore depends on how many people have yet to see it, or how many people still find it novel. Once most people have visited the attraction or similar ones, its novelty evaporates, its tourist market fades, and its life cycle comes to an end.

Moreover, sightseeing attractions are mostly static, such as natural landscapes or fixed man-made structures. They are difficult to alter, since alteration often means demolition and reconstruction, and it is hard to innovate within the attraction itself in order to meet tourists’ endless demand for novelty. Even when investment is used to create “novel” attractions, such as reconstructed ancient villages, the marginal supply of novelty tends to diminish.

Often, when a certain type of “novel” attraction has been invented, it is rapidly copied and imitated, leading to widespread homogenization and accelerating the erosion of its novelty. For example, many artificial attractions in China—including fabricated ethnic villages—have gradually fallen into decline because they resemble one another so closely. In response, some have called for greater tourism innovation, meaning the continuous supply of new attractions to meet tourist demand. Yet the supply of “novel” attractions itself remains constrained by the law of diminishing marginal supply of novelty.

To be sure, novelty will remain one of the key factors motivating tourists for the foreseeable future; this will not change simply because the supply of novel attractions is declining. However, as the marginal supply of novelty-based products declines, the development of sightseeing tourism will face increasingly severe constraints imposed by the tension between the subjectivity of joy and the objectivity of “joy products.”

Is there another type of tourism that can resolve this tension? There is: vacation tourism. To understand why, we can turn to the theory of emotional scaffolding. Emotional scaffolds are stimuli that evoke positive emotions or affective elements in a relatively stable way.

Vacation tourism: Evoking positive emotions

Joy is an emotion. Like other emotions, it also has scaffolds, and the scaffolds that support joy are objective. From the perspective of emotional scaffolding theory, joy as a subjective state can therefore be translated into an objective form. A vacation destination serves as the material scaffold for joyful emotions, while family members, partners, service staff, and local residents at the destination form its social scaffold. Although these scaffolds are objective, they can evoke positive emotional responses. Viewed through this lens, the focus of vacation destination development is not necessarily novelty—though novelty is certainly welcome—but rather the creation of stable emotional scaffolds capable of evoking positive emotions such as joy.

Developing the vacation tourism sector offers a viable resolution to the tension between the subjectivity of joy and the objectivity of “joy products” that sightseeing tourism faces. This is because emotional scaffolds have objective standards: They are defined in relation to everyday experience. As long as a destination can provide an experience different from daily life, offering pleasurable variation, it will find a market. In fact, domestic demand for vacation tourism is immense, yet current offerings still fall short of fully meeting the needs of the market. Camping, for example, is a repeatable activity that provides an alternative to mundane daily routines, offering an outlet for negative emotions and a catalyst for positive ones. Looking ahead, a critical pathway toward building China into a strong tourism nation lies in intensifying research on the vacation tourism market and investing more in the development of vacation destinations.

Wang Ning is a professor from the School of Humanities at Southeast University.