Economic development in Tibetan China over the past two decades has brought Tibetans and non-Tibetans into the most extensive direct contact in history. The process began in the 1980s and accelerated during the 1990s with increasingly large state-led investment in the region. The Great Western Development Campaign, launched in 2000, sought to further the integration of China’s western regions through even larger investments in infrastructure and communications. 1 As a result, non-Tibetan migrants in search of higher-paid jobs have poured into urban Tibetan areas on an unprecedented scale. 2 More recently, economic migrants have been joined by China’s mobile middle classes. Rapid developments in transport and communications, coupled with government policies promoting leisure and consumer spending, have triggered a boom in domestic tourism. 3 Since the 1990s, millions of newly wealthy Chinese from the east have visited Tibetan areas for the first time.

Tourism’s westward expansion poses a set of interesting challenges for ethnic identity formation and ethnic relations in China. On the one hand, tourism is a force for consolidating national unity. Expanding in concert with infrastructure and markets, domestic tourism provides a vehicle for the government to explore the boundaries of the nation and tame the periphery—a civilizing project by which frontier peoples become incorporated into the nation. 4 Indeed, government policies and tourism marketing in China are designed to reinforce the concept of unity among China’s 56 nationalities—55 of which are minorities. The peoples and destinations are marketed as China’s cultural treasures and the people as Chinese ethnic groups. Tibet, for example, is commonly referred to as China’s Tibet (Zhongguo de Xizang). Not surprisingly, many of the early studies of ethnic tourism in China interpreted tourism as a mechanism for reinforcing rigid ethnic hierarchies. 5 Inspired by official Chinese discourse, a number of studies examined the way minority cultures were represented in