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Inter-area/Border Crossing
Organized Panel Session
This ethnographic inquiry concerns the rising phenomenon of global tourism among mainland Chinese in recent years. The subject of Chinese tourists and tourism is part of a larger project that intends to examine new modalities of transnational connectivity and their impact on local societies by looking into the rapid surge of Chinese consumption. The booming culture of chuguo lüyou, or going abroad to tour, not only encapsulates unprecedented waves of consumption among mainland Chinese of things such as goods, technology, lifestyles, ideas and cultures, but it also has global consequences. Primarily drawing on ethnographic research in Australia and with some references to mainland shoppers in East Asian regions such as Hong Kong and Japan,I approach tourism as an analytical subject from three dimensions — tourism and consumerism, tourism and social media, and tourism and spatiality. By consumerism, I examine the entanglement of tourism and border-crossing consumerism that Chinese tourists practice. Regarding social media, I look into the Chinese social media platform, WeChat, and examine the multifarious ways in which WeChat is bounded to the culture of Chinese tourism, as it generates exchanges, communications, and connections between the tourists, the commodities, and the varied physical and cyber spaces. Finally, as for spatiality, I demonstrate the ways in which the forces of transnational Chinese tourism and consumerism are reconfiguring particular local spaces in their destinations.
Linling Gao-Miles
Washington University in St. Louis