Tourism and Soft Power: Scripting Servicescapes For the China Outbound Market

Abstract

This article critically inspects worldmaking as a concept, lens, and approach to uncover political agendas that stretch beyond tourism. Worldmaking is a process of fabricating peoples and places through art, literature, and other representational forms. Launched in 2012 as a key deliverable of Tourism 2020, the Welcoming Chinese Visitor Program (WCVP) is a Sino-Australian device of soft power that works to Easternize business practice in the Australian tourism industry. Worldmaking assists to see how the text demanufactures bygone beliefs to remanufacture a new China through the discursive framework of patriotism, pride, and emerging world power. The analysis reveals tourism as an agent of soft power and the facilitator to further a political agenda. This postdisciplinary research draws from the psychology of human interaction with Rasmussen, Sieck, Crandall, Simpkins, and Smith's four domains of competency model and Shank and Abelson's knowledge structure model. The Service Ready module emphasizes three key themes as necessary inclusions to all servicescape scripts aimed at Chinese visitors: the 3Ps of pride, position, and power. Worldmaking as a platform for enquiry provides an approach that swivels the focus from tourism as subject to tourism as agent.