Chinese backpackers defined themselves in opposition to traditional tourism. [Zhao Yonghui / For China Daily]

How rough-and-ready traveling went from revolutionary mission to a quest for self-discovery

When Xiao Hu and his girlfriend set out last spring from Beijing with two bikes, a tent and 15,000 yuan ($2,373, 1,885 euros) in cash, the idea was to ride as far as their money would take them.

Starting from Xiao Hu's hometown in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, the couple planned to travel in a loop around China, hitting all the wild corners of Gansu and Qinghai, crawling up the Tibetan plateau and landing in the lush jungles of Yunnan, about 3,800 kilometers from their starting point.

"I played some soccer," Xiao Hu says. "My girlfriend, she took walks to and from work."

The 23-year-old bartender and his girlfriend, a waitress, are not your typical protagonists in the dominant narratives of youth travel in China, which tend to revolve around the migration of poor rural kids to the cities or rich urban kids to the West. But the couple represents a long tradition of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants backpacking that in China dates back either 25 or nearly 50 years, depending on how you look at it.

Most travelers and travel historians date the beginning of the backpacking movement back to the late 1980s, but the phenomenon of widespread youth travel kicked off in the mid-1960s.

Up until then, filial tradition dictated that children stay by their parents' sides at least until marriage, a sentiment captured in the Confucian saying, "When your parents are alive, don't travel far." (父母在，不远游。Fùmǔ zài, bù yuǎn yóu.)

It changed in 1966, when Chairman Mao proclaimed that all Red Guards - middle and high school students - should ride the trains and buses for free as part of a push to "take Beijing to the rest of the country".

As young revolutionaries from Beijing fanned out across the country to spread revolution, Red Guards from the countryside began making pilgrimages to the capital to see their leader.

Among these pilgrims was a Shandong teen surnamed Zhang, who at the age of 15 made the trip from her hometown to Beijing as a part of one of the first "Red Guard Great Exchanges" (红卫兵大串联 Hóngwèibīng Dàchuànlián).

For Zhang, now 62, it was a thrilling if grueling experience.

"At that time, the trains were really, really crowded and had no seats," she remembers. "We stood the 20 hours to Beijing."

From the early 1970s on, individual travel was tightly regulated by the government, which remained concerned about limiting migration into the cities. The logjam did not clear until well after the start of the reform and opening up (改革开放 Gǎigé Kāifàng) in 1978.

Though travel restrictions were relaxed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when an increase in food supply allowed the cities to absorb more migrant workers, most people remained too poor to travel recreationally.

That began to change on a small scale in the early 1980s, when college students with money and time began making minor trips during their semester holidays. Among these was Chen Yimu, who at the age of 17 left his small hometown in Anhui province for university in the provincial capital Hefei. It was 1979, and for Chen, even the trip to Hefei was a revelation.

"At that time my feeling was, Hefei is so big," he remembers. "This first trip included a lot of firsts in my life: the first time traveling so far away, the first time staying in a hotel, the first time seeing traffic lights and public transportation on the streets ..."

The trip planted a seed of wanderlust in Chen; throughout college he took several small trips to nearby cities like Nanjing and Wuhan. After graduating in 1983, Chen moved to Beijing for work, spending his free time biking to every corner of the city.

"The 1980s were an era brimming with passion," he says. "Young people dared to dream and dared to act."

A more than 300 kilometers bike trip to Zhangjiakou, where his brother was stationed, cemented Chen's love for rough, DIY travel. The term "backpacking" had not yet been invented, but the idea was starting to spread.

Yet even after the beginning of the reform and opening-up, travelers in China were still few and far between. Part of the reason for this was that in the 1980s, the vast majority of people then were still too poor to travel, and a sizeable portion of people's living allowances came in the form of government tickets.

Things started to shift in the 1990s, when two important changes took hold: first, the growth of the economy, and second, the introduction of a holiday system that gave most employees between seven and 15 vacation days a year.

"More spare time boosted domestic travel as well as outbound tourism," CRI reports.

Nonetheless, for a country still recovering from 30 years of economic ravages, buying the bare necessities remained the priority. As a result, most people turned to an unlikely source for their vacations: work. "In the 1990s, more people were traveling with public funds, mostly organized with their danwei (单位 work units)," says travel photographer and longtime backpacker Cheng Yuan.

In a Sina blog entitled, The Rise of the Chinese Backpacker, he adds, "People didn't understand the concept of paying for your own travel, and even felt it was a little foolish. 'Money should be saved!' my mother would remonstrate every time I took a trip."

Independent travel growth was slow throughout that decade, but from the year 2000 the idea of travel as both a leisure activity and a means of self-enrichment began to take hold in the public imagination.

"2000 to 2010 was an era of extreme growth for Chinese backpacking," Cheng Yuan writes. Much of this was related to the economy, he says, which improved markedly during and after the '90s.

"By the year 2000, there were more holidays from the workplace, and the new generation is more interested in the pursuit of the self. With so much social pressure, they all want a chance to escape from the stress, to go out and see the world. In addition, there are now discount tickets to travel abroad, and it is much easier to get visas now, so more and more people are traveling."

The Internet also had a major impact on the spread of backpacking as a culture and a philosophy. A popular traveling forum called The Prosperity of Magnificence sprouted up on Sina.com, and the term "backpacker" began to gain traction. Much like their Western counterparts, Chinese backpackers defined themselves in opposition to traditional tourism.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com