Seeing China’s social-cultural change through the eyes of tourists

Abstract

ABSTRACT Our study scrutinises the personal and collective nostalgia that shapes the performativity of tourists, in order to analyse how tourism provides a space through which urban tourists understand rural China. By interrogating the social-cultural arena through which tourists experience the countryside, we examine how toured places are imagined and consumed. Our main purpose is to ponder, through the lens of tourism, the social-cultural change post-China’s economic reform that was started in 1978. We utilise reflexive ethnography to delineate the experiences of urban tourists, in light of their perceptions of the rural places. Our findings suggest that the past is remembered in terms of the grand narratives of a bygone era of socio-political coherence, which the tourists feel has been eroded against the changing urban landscape. Methodologically, we aim to explore the possibility of pushing tourism enquiries further, from a predominantly positivist spatial science that seeks objective facts, to a more humanistic field of research involving existential and phenomenological methods.