Hanging out in Hainan (with Miss World)
Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2007, 1:14 PM by Lonely Planet
It's three in the morning in the Red Pepper nightclub in Sanya, a beach resort on Hainan Island off the south coast of China, and I'm surrounded by leggy and legless beauty queens. A few hours earlier, the 57th Miss World contest ended with Miss China being crowned as Miss World. Now, the losers are consoling themselves with champagne and cocktails
For the 106 contestants, it's their first taste of freedom for a month. Over the last four weeks, they have been confined to a luxury hotel in Sanya, a fast-growing resort that caters mainly to well-off Chinese tourists and Russians escaping their frozen winter. Allowed out only in the presence of chaperones, or the formidable Julia Morley, the British chairwoman of the Miss World Organisation, they are literally letting their hair down to the sound of cheesy Eighties classics.
While Miss World is regarded as an anachronism in the west, or worse as a sexist display that demeans women, the contest remains popular in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. The South American beauty queens in particular are a driven bunch, some of whom have clearly spent large sums on enhancing their natural assets. Other contestants, though, seem more laidback, treating the experience as a fun way to see a bit of China.
But for the Chinese, hosting Miss World for four out of the last five years has had both economic and propaganda value. Hainan used to be best known as the place where China's emperors exiled those who had displeased them. Now, the island receives 16 million tourists a year and tourism is helping lift the locals, whose only other options are fishing and farming, out of poverty. And with 23 year-old Beijinger Zhang Zilin reigning as Miss World in the same year Beijing will host the Olympics, the government must be glad it ended its ban on beauty contests five years ago.
- David A Eimer
Labels: "Festivals and events", Asia and Pacific
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2 Comments:
Interesting...Miss China wins the contest in Hainan, China. I wonder who will win the Olympics in China in 2008???
I am an Australian who has visited Hainan and traveled the three highways - East, Central and West to Sanya and back to Haikou.
Of the 16 million other tourists to Hainan, how many are my fellow Australians or Dutch, English, Indian, American and Japanese. How many have stayed awhile in Dongfang County, the old Basuo of WW11 fame, or taken the trouble to visit the Darwin funded Australian War memorial in Lao Ou Village among the minorities people toward Central Hainan.
Young Australians should make the trip - it might help their understanding of China in particular and Asia in general.
I wonder whether former Australian Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard, and present Prime Minister Keven Rudd, made the 'pilgrimage' during their visits to the annual Boao Forum ?
Michael C.H. Jones
President - ACCCI
(Australia China Chamber of Commerce and Industry - www.accci.com.au)
PS There is a tribute to all the dead under the ATSSP tab of the Special Projects section on the Homepage
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