Hainan, China -

andace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City, is in the lobby of Sheraton Sanya Resort, wearing her best Manolo Blahniks and waiting for her limo. She is here, along with Jackie Chan, Brian Ferry and a host of other tuxedoed celebrities, to choose the 53rd Miss World beauty queen. But right now I have her judging something else.

"Ms Bushnell," I ask. "What do you think of Hainan Island?"

"I had no idea," she confides, lowering her voice and rubber necking the decadent, space squandering reception area. "I Googled Hainan before I left New York and from what I read on the Internet I was expecting it to be a bit, you know, grungy. But look at this…" She waves a manicured hand at the lobby. It is quite a scene: Gangs of celebrities and gaggles of Miss This and Miss That cluster on sofas and around tables. Stick-insect waitresses move amongst them bearing cocktail trays and, at most, three per cent body fat. "No sweetheart," Ms Bushnell interrupts, sensing my concentration is wandering, "not the women... Great hotels always have pretty women. I am talking about that…" The Sex and The City author stabs a jewelled finger towards the back of the hotel. And there, framed by stunning floor to ceiling windows, is Hainan's big secret: a perfect white beach and an ocean as blue as Paul Newman's eyes.

Hainan is on the same latitude as Hawaii and all day the weather has been predictably perfect. But now, as the sun starts to dip into the ocean and trails of red and gold are spreading across the evening sky, through the window we can see families and couples returning from the beach, with their designer swimwear, USD 200 sunglasses and blessed-out sun-soaked smiles.

"That's what I didn't expect," continues Miss Bushnell. "It's straight out of a travel brochure. This is not at all how I expected China to be. I thought it would be one billion tourists fighting for beach space."

Two days later Miss Ireland carried off the tiara. But by then, Hainan Island – China's sleeping beauty – had unofficially won hearts for best global debut.

As makeovers go it was a long time coming. Hainan might have all the trappings of tropical paradise, but for more than one thousand years it was among China's least visited, unpopular and most despised destinations. As the Middle Kingdom's southernmost point it was the ultimate place of exile. Out-of-favour courtiers could be reliably banished to the remote sub-tropical island and never heard from again. One such exile, the Tang Dynasty's mayor Li Deyu, described the island as the "Gates of Hell". You can almost picture him there: seething among the coconut palms, stamping down the empty white beaches, whingeing about being "out of the loop". If only he had brought a beach towel, a trash novel and his factor 25.

These days a little bit of exile is what everybody wants. As the rest of South East China obsesses over production rates, Hainan is learning to market itself to capitalism's flipside: namely a well-earned week of sun, sex, sea, sand and slothfulness. This year the island, which at 13,100 square kilometres is just a little smaller than Taiwan, expects to welcome almost 12 million guests of hugely varying incomes and expectations. But – thanks to the island's size and its increasingly mature tourist industry – these differing groups will rarely cross paths.

Yalong Bay, where Miss Bushnell et al are staying, is the island's most upscale resort area and the focus of a new building boom. There are already nine resort hotels and an international golf club, and another six international brand resorts, including resort spas by the Hyatt, Shangri-la chains, are nearing completion. The Marriott has just opened. This, of course, means that 2005 will be a bumper year for up market bargains in Hainan as all the new hotels will be opening around the same time. Yalong Bay, which has a 7 kilometre long white beach, is privately owned and operated. So it is safe and very clean, but also eerily sterile. If you get cabin fever hop in a taxi and make the 20-minute journey to Sanya, the swarming place of Miss Bushnell's "sunbathing billions".

Dressed in matching Hawaiian shirts and shorts and beetling enthusiastically behind their tour rep's flag, Hainan's package tourists are a worthy sight in themselves. Special zones have been developed to feed, bed and entertain them: football pitch-sized restaurants, 2,000 room hotels and massive theme parks whose key function seems to be the ability to offer novel forms of travel and something to photograph every two feet. A good example is Tianya Haijiao, the cluster of rocks that appear on the back of the two renminbi note and which (as the Middle Kingdom's near southernmost point) represents the "the edge of the sky and rim of the sea". On a busy day some 4,000 people have their photograph taken by the rocks. The rowdy queue can snake back for 500 metres. To keep people amused and justify the RMB 60 entrance fee, the management has finessed an unnecessarily long journey from bus park to site. Along the way visitors are offered the choice of paying extra for the following means of transport: bus, rickshaw, golf buggy, horse, lama, elephant, ostrich, tandem, camel, roller-skates, go-kart, or unicycle.

Hainan's third major tourist area is the Bo Ao Scenic Zone, China's newest upscale conference complex and already it is giving Beihai, the traditional venue for Government 'retreats', a run for its money. The site, on a natural island to the east of Hainan, was chosen by Jiang Zemin himself in the wake of 9/11 and is the most secure upscale conference centre in Asia. Since 2002 it has been the permanent site of the Bo Ao Forum for Asia, an annual gathering of the region's political leaders and already it has the accolade of being the only place outside Pakistan that President Musharraf of Pakistan feels comfortable without a 30-man security contingent. The resort's flagship hotel, the Sofitel Bo Ao, is one of China's best.

Hainan island is a sign of the times, and an optimistic indicator of how leisure travel in China can develop. Mass tourism and exclusive resorts co exist and even complement each other, the one providing a bonus attraction for the other. Let's hope the A list celebrities do not mind making their own small contribution to China's tourism boom, and that when a hundred or so bikini-clad Miss World contestants take over the rocks at the edge of the sky and the rim of the sea for their own photo shoot, the masses are patient. They might have queued for hours.