Ethnic Tourism In China

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With an increasing number of scholars who become interested in the development of tourism in modern China (e.g. Gu & Ryan, 2012; Huang, 2011; Oakes, 2012; Xiao, 1997, 2012; Xie, 2003), the understanding of Chinese cultural and historical specificities often contextualizes the research paradigm. However, a close look at the China-cum-the specific context reveals that the West-China dichotomy, specifically, the ethnic differences of Chinese people, pertains to the current tourism research about China in terms of its refraining in the theme “ethnic tourism”. One methodological path that followed this cultural division is an endorsement of Chinese nativism that requires a Chinese theoretical approach in understanding Chinese tourism (e.g., Xiao, …show more content…

Grewal, 1996; Kaplan, 1996; Widmer, 2006; Hu, 2004; 1997), where national/ethnic differences are often highlighted as a marker of distinction between Western and non-Western travel experiences, travel and mobility have also become flagships of ethnic boundaries. In a way that mobility and travel is considered as defining criteria for the First and Third worlds (Pritchard, 2000), the politics of nationalism and ethnicity become the dominant theoretical trajectory to be followed. I do not propose that issues of colonialism and orientalism need to be dismissed in modern tourism research, because after all they compose the cultural and material foundations of the business. But rather, in the light that travel experience are not only marvels but concerns more about daily mundane, quotidian and fragments (Edensor, 2007; Noy, 2014; Larsen, 2008; Urry, 2007; Hannam et al., 2006; Cresswell, 2010), the exclusive focus on the grandeur may block our understanding of the meaning of travel. As Qin (2014:108) specifies in the observation of mobile experience of Chinese female: “The modern experience of the female students and teachers is not the politically patriotic ideal, but rather the daily experience of the ‘customs, food, residence, and mobility’ of the other city that they need to survive in.” The question neglected for ethnic people, therefore, is how they have experienced and represented the daily, mundane and triviality in travel as ways of articulating

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