Mining for tourists in China: a digital ethnography of user-generated content from coal mining heritage parks

ABSTRACT

Mine parks and industrial heritage are relatively recent tourism phenomena, emerging in Europe and North America during the mid-twentieth century. In the People’s Republic of China, government officials undertook large-scale promotion of mining heritage between 2005 and 2021, when 88 former state-sector mines were designated national parks. From an official vantage point, transforming former extractive industries into heritage sites helped communities negatively affected by the social and environmental legacies of mining and mine closure to pursue a future in China’s lucrative tourism sector. To date, this endeavour has been little studied, with research on visitors’ experiences particularly limited. In this article, we interrogate Chinese tourists’ responses to national mining heritage by analysing online user-generated content (tourist reviews) from three coal-mines-turned-heritage parks. We ask how visitors made meaning at these sites, and whether and how the mining tourism imaginaries they co-constructed in online reviews resembled visitor experiences of mining heritage elsewhere. How Chinese tourists respond to the parks not only affects the state’s ability to achieve its development goals, but also informs perceptions of mining, energy production, and tourism more broadly. Such perceptions have implications for sustainable resource and energy use.

KEYWORDS:

• Industrial heritage
• visitor experience
• tourism imaginary
• PRC
• energy
• sustainability

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and journal editor Dr Jennifer Frost for their helpful comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript. We would also like to thank participants at the anthropology seminar hosted by the Department of Anthropology at Seoul National University, and the anthropology seminar hosted by the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg for their input on an earlier version of the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One billion Yuan equals 140,000,000 euro as of 15 March 2023.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [grant number: P18-0515:1].

Notes on contributors

Maris Boyd Gillette

Maris Boyd Gillette is professor of social anthropology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has published extensively on China’s transition to capitalism, with particular attention to changing production and consumption patterns and state-society relations. In recent years she has conducted research on industrial heritage in China, first in Jingdezhen, and more recently related to national mine parks. Gillette is principal investigator of a multi-year research project on Chinese mining heritage and tourism funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Other recent research looks at food, biodiversity, Swedish fishers, and coastal communities.

Eric Boyd

Eric Boyd is a research associate at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, specialising in extractivism, heritage, and future imaginaries. He is an active member of the Young Researchers Network at ZiRS research centre in Halle, Germany, and the DurhamArctic Research Group, Durham, UK.