Group lifestyle mobilities: understanding Chinese senior long-stay tourists in rural destinations

Abstract

Existing work on senior lifestyle mobilities in China has predominantly focused on therapeutic landscape imaginaries and second-home cities. This paper shifts the focus to the group-oriented lifestyle pursuits of Chinese urban seniors who temporarily reside in rural areas for extended vacations. By interviewing Chinese senior long-stay tourists in rural destinations, this study examines how their decisions to engage in long-stay tourism are driven by the quest for a communal leisure lifestyle characterised by group living routines and a sense of camaraderie. Our findings highlight the role of geo-arbitrage in facilitating and accommodating these group-oriented mobility patterns among senior tourists. Yet, their mobile later life experiences are also marked by precariousness and vulnerability due to individual and group-level health decline, as well as the disparities in senior care services between urban and rural regions in China.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.