China has a long tradition of literati going out to areas of scenic beauty and leaving us poetic or artistic records of their experiences, from lonely contemplation to drunken poetry contests with their friends. In some ways this tradition is still with us today. It survives in the lists of important sights (the sun rising over Yellow Mountain in Anhui, for instance, but not particularly the sunset) which tourists want to see, and which grow in part out of the commemorated experiences of famous literati. It lives also in the memories of the famous paintings and poems that shape people's travels to these places – doubling direct experience with the vicarious experience of the artist.

The huge increase in nature tourism sites in both China and Taiwan over the last two decades, however, is not a direct continuation of that tradition. Governments have led much of its growth because only they control sufficient land resources. Both the Communist and the Nationalist governments have depended almost entirely on imported models of nature tourism for these developments. Neither one opposes the evocation of those old literati traditions, but neither one has made much significant effort to build on them either. Instead, at least on the surface, we have a direct globalization of American, Japanese, and United Nations models, which influences everything from the legal frameworks for the creation of the parks to the training of tour guides and rangers.