Tourism and the reconfiguration of host group identities: a case study of ethnic tourism in rural Guangxi, China

Abstract

This paper examines the role of tourism in providing cognitive alternatives for the strengthening of place-based ethnic minority group identities in China, and scrutinises subsequent affects of China's integrative policy of ethnic and economic assimilation through tourism. During China's post-1978 reform period, tourism has been utilised in many rural areas as a tool for the economic and social development of rural toured communities. Consequently, tourism has been responsible for huge social, economic and political changes for ethnic minority peoples and landscapes that have been foregrounded into nationalistic tourist discourses. The research is based on ethnographic interviews and observation in the Dong ethnic minority village of Ma'an in south-western China's Guangxi province. Findings are considered with Tajfel and Turner's ‘Social Identity Theory’, which is utilised as an approach to understand how minority groups adapt and react under situations of social change in order to create and maintain positive group identities. The discussion highlights the role of tourism in providing a stimulus for the creation of a local group identity based on ethnic and rural difference and local cultural achievement, which in turn subverts wider negative discourses of rural areas and ethnic minorities. By heightening ethnic and social differences, tourism is shown to be exciting feelings within the Dong host community which are contrary to the wider integrative and socio-economic ideology of State tourism policy in ethnic minority areas.