Internalisation and negotiation: Everyday life practice and spatial production of residents in tourism villages on the China–North Korea border

Abstract

Research on rural tourism in border regions—where national security, local development, and international cooperation intersect—remains underexplored, despite their growing geopolitical and socio-cultural significance. This study foregrounds the agency of local residents and the power of everyday life in shaping the spatial evolution of rural tourism. Drawing on fieldwork in a China–North Korea border village, it reveals that residents adopt two behavioural logics in their everyday engagement with the production of tourism space: ‘internalisation’ and ‘negotiation’. Internalisation is enacted through strategies such as embedding, integration, and derivation, while negotiation unfolds through tactics including avoidance, silence, complaint, detour, and dialogue. These practices reconfigure community social relations and give rise to a production dynamic that integrates instrumental and value rationalities. The region’s ‘fusion culture’ provides the sociocultural grounding through which residents construct place-based meanings and informal norms in tourism interactions, reflecting the creativity of everyday life and the importance of localised practice.