With the rise of tourism enthusiasm toward the Tibetan Plateau since 2006, small-scale hostels in Lhasa, the provincial capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, have quickly accumulated in numbers and become a cultural icon of the local tourism sector.
While Lhasa’s hostel sector seems to be monopolised by businessmen from inland China, the recent fieldwork suggests that those “outsiders” are a group of lifestyle migrants who temporarily relocate to Lhasa in search of a better way of life rather than better economic opportunities. Such a unique feature leads to the lack of interest in maximizing the financial returns from their hostel business and the common absence of a long-term business plan. Rather, they have devoted themselves to idealising Lhasa in front of tourists not as a tourist destination but as a home that offers exclusive opportunities for self-expression and where a preferred lifestyle can be fulfilled. As a result, lifestyle migration to Lhasa to open hostels in the local tourism sector has quickly been recognised as a cultural practice by Chinese youth and became a new subculture among them in the early 2010s.
This paper begins with the exploration of the history of the lifestyle migration to Lhasa city, followed by a thorough examination of the demographic characteristics of the community. It further focuses on the home-making process of individual lifestyle migrants from perspectives including material culture, politics of space, daily interactions between lifestyle migrants and other groups, etc. By discussing their post-migration life at the destination and how their identity has been constantly negotiated, this paper provides a fresh perspective for understanding not only the lifestyle migration phenomenon but also the larger socioeconomic context in contemporary China.
