Revisiting cultural approaches to Chinese tourists

Abstract

Scholarship on Chinese tourists has stressed the influence of collectivism, Confucianism, and other traditional values. While significant, these approaches assume a singular, holistic view of culture that is at odds with recent approaches in the sociology of culture that stress the domain-specific, situational, and flexible nature of cultural scripts. Using fresh empirical evidence of Chinese tourists to non-mainstream destinations, this article demonstrates that tourism frequently disembeds tourists from traditional sources of cultural authority. I suggest viewing culture in tourism as a contextual set of repertoires used to (1) draw symbolic boundaries, (2) perform situational, diverse scripts, and (3) self-reflect on personal and collective identities. These results counter the idea that Chinese tourists have internalised one master set of cultural responses.