This workshop aims to contribute to on-going study on the role of tourism in the construction of a Chinese experience of modernity which is currently reshaping the real and imaginary landscapes of the urban and the rural spheres along new lines and new modes. As elsewhere the "urban" and the experiences and images associated with the notion have become the conquering signifier of a contemporary modern Chinese condition. In the same time, the fast development of leisure mobility contributes to the " un éclatement of the urban over the rural". These social and cultural forces are diminishing the radical and arbitrary distances between the two spheres created by the experiences of the past century. All tourist destinations and places, the " countryside " consumed by tourist is a place designed and (re)shaped to satisfy the representations and desires of mainly "urban" visitors. The modes and forms of this new encounter between the rural and the urban that takes place during the tourist experiences must be examined, particularly in the new sites where these "desires of other places" are being materialised (rural tourism, environment tourism, seaside tourism etc.) For the population of the urban areas, the rural, under its various declinations, was long despised as synonymous of poverty and backwardness. Development of tourism flux since the beginning of the reforms of the Post-Mao area has brought a fast moving flux of urban citizens toward rural space reshaped and offered to tourist consumption under the various promotional labels to "rural tourism", "green tourism", the "blue tourism" of the seaside coast and "white tourism" in new ski resorts, as well as "ecotourism"". These new concepts rings as the promises of new experiences which inscribe social actors in the (re)enchanted world of tourism, the space of an experience of modernity shared at the universal scale.
