Territorialization on tour: The tourist gaze along the Silk Road Economic Belt in Kashgar, China

Abstract

Since 2009, and over the following decade, Kashgar Old City—an historical space of Uyghur culture and Islam and home to 220,000 residents—was largely demolished and rebuilt for tourists. Today, Kashgar and the Xinjiang region are major conduits into Eurasia and have become critical nodes in China’s national tourism development and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While scholars have addressed the geoeconomics of BRI, we know much less about how contested spaces of Chinese development are securitized. Tourism, we argue, is increasingly enrolled into the state’s broader territorialization-by-securitization strategy. The tourist gaze—or the socio-spatial mediation of touristic experience and performance—is included in this strategic arsenal. In contested areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet, the tourist gaze is spatially deployed by the state as a biopolitical mechanism that facilitates the deepening territorialization of the region and coerces ethnic minority residents to perform a sanitized revisioning of their culture, history, and religion. This article draws on interviews with Uyghur former tour guides and residents of Xinjiang, critical analysis of English and Mandarin language popular media, and observations of congruent patterns of the securitization of tourism destinations as a state-strategy of territorialization in Tibet to demonstrate how the tourist gaze is deployed as a spatial mechanism of securitization and territorialization along the Silk Road Economic Belt in Kashgar. The article contributes to emerging scholarship on the growing role of tourism in broader practices of securitization and territorialization in China and beyond.