China Tourism: Cross-cultural Studies

Honggen Xiao, Mimi Li

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317613398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Deriving from a special issue on "China Watching" (Journal of China Tourism Research), this book presents the readers with a collection of seven independent research reports that adopt cross-cultural communication and cultural studies approaches to China tourism. Topics covered include the authenticity in cultural diffusion, the articulation of China through tourism, cross-cultural comparison of vacation consumption interpretation, the Chinese gaze of Europe, influence of globalization and localization on the development of tourism, behavioral implications of Chinese outbound tourism, and citing behaviors of Chinese tourism researchers from foreign language sources.

The book will be of great interest to academic researchers, graduate students, policy makers, and destination managers who are interested in China tourism. The varied aspects covered, together with the engaging writing style, makes the text a pleasure to read.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of China Tourism Research.

Guest Editors’ Note

This special issue publishes research on tourism to (and from) China and its associated policy, development, and business practices from cross-cultural communication and cultural studies perspectives. Theoretically, the (re)presentation and interpretation of culture are often characteristic of an incommensurability and at times contradictions in ideology and values, which often result in discourse that does not share cultural and rhetorical traditions. Liu (1999), in argumentation studies, alluded to such cross-cultural, typically East–West, interlocutions as the justification of one’s position in another’s terms, in which he observed “non-Western interlocutors in general are willing to debate cross-cultural issues in Western terms, whereas Western interlocutors are also increasingly seeking to justify their positions in non-Western terms” (p. 297). Contextually it is within the same complexity that this special issue on “China watching” is conceived.

For discourse analysts, the (re)presentation and interpretation of cultural Others have remained a key concern in tourism (Caton & Santos, 2009). In this regard, for more than half a century, China has been both changing and changed in her journey toward modernization and growth, which is typical of a mass-mediated process of global–local interactions (Teo, 2003) and mutual gaze (Maoz, 2006). As a cultural encounter, tourism to and from this emerging world-leading destination and origin serves as an ideal magnet for a cross-cultural scrutiny of the politics, art, and even beauty of China watching (Xiao & Mair, 2006). As such, it provides a culturally distinct and rich context to bring into play the perspectives of cultural studies, media and communication studies, journalism, and Chinese and Asian studies for the interpretation of cultural (re)presentation in relation to tourism and leisure.

This special issue features seven articles that adopt cross-cultural approaches to China tourism. In terms of perspectives on research collaboration, four articles were written by coauthorships of both Chinese and Anglo-European origins. Keith Hollinshead and Chun Xiao Hou provocatively discuss China tourism capitalizing on a (the) “soft power” derived from traditional Chinese philosophies and Confucian thoughts, as a subtle authority and undersuspected agency that the nation deploys, through its government projection, in alignment with its economic strength and international strategies. Jundan (Jasmine) Zhang and Eric J. Shelton address authenticity in cultural diffusion through their reflection, and occasionally eulogy, of the construction (or reproduction) of a Chinese garden in New Zealand. Nicolette de Sausmarez, Huiqing Tao, and Peter McGrath report on the cultural differences and behavioral implications of Chinese outbound tourists to the United Kingdom, whereas Julio Aramberri and Chunmei Liang take a reverse track of the “gaze” by analyzing how Chinese travel magazines portray Europe to their potential tourist audiences.

In addition, three articles were produced by authors of Chinese origin, who nevertheless are Western educated and consequently are conversant in Western rhetoric and capable of understanding, communicating with, and even debating on tourism issues from cross-cultural perspectives. Yujie Zhu, taking Naxi Ancient Music, Lijiang Impression, and Naxi Marriage Courtyard in southwest China’s Yunnan Province as examples, explores how globalization influences the three cultural performances as an external force (e.g., catering to Western tourists) and how these performances as a form of cultural capital are internally interpreted, imagined, and transformed by the local/domestic tourist market. Xiaoxiao Fu, Xinran Y. Lehto (half Chinese by name), and Liping A. Cai investigate cultural and behavioral differences in Chinese versus American vacation experiences and find that divergences in values are instigated by unique cultural dispositions. The last article in this collection, by Honggen Xiao, Qu Xiao, and Mimi Li, looks at power relationships that govern the perceptions and behavior of Chinese tourism researchers citing foreign-language sources in contemporary social science communication.

We wish to thank our panel of referees for their time and expertise. Candy Li, editorial assistant of Journal of China Tourism Research, has been very helpful in coordinating anonymous reviews of these manuscripts. Without their commitments and inputs, this special issue would not have been possible. Notwithstanding the scope of China watching, articles in this collection are complementary in approaches and perspectives; it is our hope that this special issue will trigger interest in, and in a way point out directions for, future undertakings on China tourism from cross-cultural perspectives.

Honggen Xiao

Mimi Li

Guest Editors

References

Caton, K., & Santos, C. (2009). Images of the Other: Selling study abroad in a postcolonial world. Journal of Travel Research, 48(2), 191–204.

Liu, Y. (1999). Justifying my position in your terms: Cross-cultural argumentation in a globalized world. Argumentation, 13(3), 297–315.

Maoz, D. (2006). The mutual gaze. Annals of Tourism Research, 33(1), 221–239.

Teo, P. (2003). Global and local interactions in tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 30(2), 287–306.

Xiao, H., & Mair, H. (2006). “A paradox of images”: Representation of China as a tourist destination. Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, 20(2), 1–14.

The Seductions of “Soft Power”: The Call for Multifronted Research Into the Articulative Reach of Tourism in China

KEITH HOLLINSHEAD
CHUN XIAO HOU

In recent years, tourism has been increasingly posited as not just that set of ordinary promotional processes by which destinations are projected to visitors from afar (and by which those holiday-makers/trippers are managed there) but also as that mix of political and aspirational activities through which institutions and interest groups variously collaborate and contend to solidify particular visions of their supposed culture, heritage, and nature for not only distant/external others but for their own proximal/internal selves. Working from these later/broader perspectives, this article calls for a much richer critique of the ways in which China itself is articulated. Drawing particularly from Bell’s (2008) scrutiny of Confucian orientations to the world and from Nyíri’s (2006) examination of declarative agency of and over tourism, this article calls for deeper and more sustained critique of the conceivable “soft power” normalizations of China through tourism today.

Introduction: The Power of Representation in Tourism

Recently, the subject of representation—that is, the production of meaning through language, discourse, and image (S. Hall, 1997)—has won a pivotal position in contemporary investigations of culture. And recently, tourism has been found to play a prominent role as a producer and communicator of such sorts of representational meaning (Selwyn, 1996; Rothman, 1998). This investigation of and about China proposes to examine the role and function of tourism as a representational system through which the meaning of and about peoples, places, and pasts is made and exchanged; that is, made and exchanged via the everyday institutional and corporate interactions (and the social and personal interactions) of international tourism/global travel. To this end, the study proposes to follow the lead of tourism studies researchers such as Buck (1993), Lidchi (1997), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), and Hollinshead (2007) and explore the ordinary and the special fashions by which tourism:

• expressively articulates populations and places;

• creatively images populations and places; and

• performatively manufactures/demanufactures/remanufactures populations and places.

In this way, this study of China as an imaginal realm proposes to probe the manner in which cultural, ethnic, regional, and other differences about peoples and nations are nowadays signified through tourism in China; that is, how the government (at various levels) and the tourism industry construct (or rather coconstruct) particular local visions and national versions of identity as particular places/particular pasts/particular presents are opened up, exhibited, and/or promoted. Consequently, the investigation (Hou, 2010) upon which this article is largely based positions tourism as a rich narrative arena of representation in which concrete practices of signification and received or established interpretations may be discerned to define what given nations, or given cities, or given cultural spaces are and thereby who rightly belongs or rules there and also who is being excluded from such representations or otherwise denied/delimited by them.

Before attention is turned in this article to the more concrete matters of signification and symbolism that Bell (2008) and Nyíri (2006) specifically addressed in and around “soft power” and declarative articulations of China, respectively, attention will be given here to explain how representation is generally a critical matter to explore in terms of the subjects it makes and the silences it deals in or engenders. This is a must for this study: this critique in Journal of China Tourism Research is premised on the view that the Eurocentric held truths that are conveyed through representational practices have become a powerful force to undersuspectingly dominate the rest of the world. But during the 21st century, other outlooks—particularly those reflective of the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India, and of China, itself—will come to challenge (and already are challenging) that symbolic/significatory hegemony. And tourism certainly will increasingly matter in terms of such replacement knowledge production, such corrective place creation, and such realigned interpretation of history and geography.

To Gandhi (1998), it is highly important that considerable attention is made to who encodes and who decodes what, where, and when if the power of the representational talk and deeds of governments and corporations are to be decently understood and effectively monitored. To her, we all increasingly live in an age of constant cultural/political projection and ethnic/national articulation—an age of coercion and seduction. As Said (1994) informed us, while the world quickly globalizes or quickly glocalizes, it is vital for many populations and governments that the representational violence of imperialism of the last two centuries (and more!) are recognized and that the touchy significations of knowing the self and knowing the other are closely tracked. And it is crucial (in fields like tourism management and tourism studies) that the fresh representational counternarratives of colonized populations (or formerly colonized populations) are closely identified. Such—in tourism management and tourism studies—is the new and expansive discursive cartography of tourism in response to its old universalizing representational geography. Such is the new symbolic sensorium of (especially) the self-representation of peoples/places/pasts and thereby the new and previously unimaginable or impossible representational utterances of tourism and related fields (Venn, 2006). Such is the power of tourism and related fields in matters of being and becoming and thereby in the new strategic rhetorics of futurity (Agathangelou & Ling, 2009).

Background: Soft Power Articulation and Understanding

Having introduced the general and incremental importance of representational activity today, a short opening comment will be given as to the representational repertoires (after S. Hall, 1997) that exist in China today that the tourism state of China can and does draw upon. It will be carried out via an explanation of what soft power and declarative agency are in terms of the general articulation of cultures/places/nations through tourism. (For an explanation of the dynamisms and mobilizations of the tourism state, see McKay [1994], originally speaking of Nova Scotia, and refer to Hollinshead [2009b] for further critique of the emergent declarative role of the state in tourism.)

The Bas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Guest Editors’ Note
• 2. The Seductions of “Soft Power”: The Call for Multifronted Research Into the Articulative Reach of Tourism in China
• 3. Authentic Antipodean Chineseness? A Scholar’s Garden in Aotearoa/New Zealand
• 4. Chinese Outbound Tourism to the United Kingdom: Issues for Chinese and British Tour Operators
• 5. The Chinese Gaze: Imaging Europe in Travel Magazines
• 6. When the Global Meets the Local in Tourism—Cultural Performances in Lijiang as Case Studies
• 7. Culture-Based Interpretation of Vacation Consumption
• 8. The Behavior of Citing: A Perspective on Science Communication Across Languages
• Index