30 Years of Backpacking.docVIP

30 Years of Backpacking 　　When Xiao Hu and his girlfriend set out last spring from Beijing with two bikes, a tent and RMB15,000 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 loop around China, hitting the wild corners of Gansu and Qinghai, crawling up the Tibetan plateaus and landing in the lush jungles of Yunnan―2,400 miles from their starting point. How did they prepare? 　　“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, aren’t 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-ofyour-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 80s, but the phenomenon of widespread youth travel kicked off in the mid-1960s with the Cultural Revolution. Up to then, filial tradition dictated that children stay by their parents?sides, a sentiment captured in the Confucian saying,揥hen your parents are alive, don抰 travel far.?(wide父母在，不远游。) 　　But in 1966, such notions were upended by a collective madness for revolution. That year, it was 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.” Trains were rerouted, crash pads set up in factories and homes and the People’s Liberation Army made responsible for ensuring the Red Guards had enough to eat. 　　The result was explosive. In a 1968 interview, quoted in the newspaper Revolutionary Worker, an American who was then studying in Beijing remembers the