The seductions of “soft power”: the call for multifronted research into the articulative reach of tourism in China

Abstract

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.