Tourism geographies in the ‘Asian Century’

Abstract

From the British Century of the 1800s to the American Century of the 1900s to the contemporary Asian Century, tourism geographies are deeply entangled in broader shifts in geopolitical power (Luce, 1999; Scott, 2008; Shenkar, 2006). This paper considers what the transition into the Asian Century means for some of the most urgent issues of our time such as sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, and environmental change. We critique Anglo-Western centrism in tourism theory and call on tourism scholars to make radical shifts toward more inclusive epistemology and praxis. In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, the significance of the themes addressed are more urgent than ever. The pandemic has hastened claims that the Asian century has further accelerated given the contrasting successes of many Asia-Pacific countries, especially as compared to their Euro-American counterparts (Park, 2020). As critical tourism scholars, we are faced with an unprecedented situation, even as the pandemic looks set to become globally endemic and the true extent of its fullest impacts are only beginning to emerge, with more to surface in the years ahead. That the world faces increasing turmoil is abundantly clear. Yet, amidst the disruption to the everyday, it is hope and compassion, but also political-economic restructuring that is needed to reset the tourism industry in more sustainable, equitable, and ethical directions (Cheer, 2020; Lew, Cheer, Haywood, Brouder, Salazar, 2020; Mostafanezhad, 2020). While in no uncertain terms, the pandemic has forever changed the tourism industry as we once knew it, it is our hope that we can collectively build on the momentum of the inclusive scholarship that Critical Tourism Studies-Asia Pacific is renowned for (Edelheim, 2020; Pernecky, 2020) as we pause to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of tourism in a post-pandemic Asian Century.

Keywords:

• Critical Tourism Studies Asia-Pacific
• Asian Century
• critical tourism studies
• geopolitics
• hopeful scholarship
• Asia Pacific

The 19th century belonged to the United Kingdom, the 20th century to the United States. Many market experts and analysts now speculate that the 21st century will be remembered as the ‘Asian Century’, dominated by rising superpowers such as Indonesia, India and China (Holmes, 2017).

Coined in 1988 by Deng Xiaoping during his meeting with India’s then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the term ‘Asian Century’ has become a compelling characterization of the region’s prospects in the 21^st century. In the recent podcast, ‘The Asian Century has Arrived’, Oliver Tonby (2019) proclaimed, ‘it’s not about if and when Asia will rise, but how Asia is going to lead’. Today, the term refers to the economic and political ascendency of Asia as well as to the so-called ‘Chinese Century’ as a key pillar alongside tremendous growth in the economies of India, South Korea, and the tiger economies of Southeast Asia. Apropos to a wider Asia-directed pivot, global coloniality and the Asian century are intimately intertwined; Asia’s rise does not mean coloniality has ended, but rather that neocolonial power is increasingly shared with non-western states (Lee et al. 2015, p. 187). Asia’s ascendancy marks a geopolitical reckoning that has intensified since Barrack Obama’s 2011 nod to Asia urging more productive relations drawing on common interests (Silove, 2016). For many analysts, the 2016 Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and the American withdrawal by Donald Trump reflects the declining hegemony of Western states (Beeson, 2020). Today, China’s shadow over the region continues to widen the scope of its geopolitical and foreign policy deliberations and the prospects of Asia are increasingly and inextricably entwined with China.

As Jonathan Woetzel argues, Asia’s growing dominance in world affairs is irrefutable – ‘the Asian century is an indisputable reality’ (McKinsey, 2019a, n.p.). Parag Khanna (2019) similarly notes how, ‘Asians once again see themselves as the center of the world – and its future’. The drift to the East is more or less complete with the recenterings at play not only about realignment of wide-ranging hegemonies, historical legacies, economic and geopolitical power shifts, but it also encompasses cultural repositioning away from dominant Western-centric invocations, to others that increasingly take in diverse influences and most notably Asia-centric ones. Indeed, the current COVID-19 pandemic and resultant tensions emerging in increasingly divided worldviews reflect these broader geopolitical anxieties (Mostafanezhad et al., 2020). Tharoor (2020) notes that ‘Since the late 20th century – dubbed by Time Magazine’s founder as the “American Century” – there has been talk of the 21st century as the Asian one. It took several geopolitical shocks for the vision of the “American” century to take hold… The pandemic may be another epochal jolt to the system, reshaping how we think about the course of global affairs’. Facing unprecedented challenges, the global tourism landscape where the Asian footprints loom large is now on hold as travel restrictions and quarantine orders worldwide have curtailed international travel. Yet, emerging evidence suggests that tourism recovery will first center around domestic markets and progressively among neighboring countries in Asia (McKinsey, 2019b), and as for tourism recovery in China, how this unfolds will be a harbinger of what is to come for the global industry (Zhang, 2020).

From the British Century of the 1800s to the American Century of the 1900s to the contemporary Asian Century, tourism geographies are deeply entangled in broader shifts in geopolitical power (Luce, 1999; Scott, 2008; Shenkar, 2006). While Gillen (2016) and others (e.g. Mascitelli & O'Mahony, 2014) have critiqued the potential of the Asian Century to clarify more than it obscures, what is clear is that the cultural and political-economic climate in which tourism operates has transitioned along with broader power shifts. However, as Gillen notes, the area we call ‘Asia’ is extremely diverse, constitutes 75 percent of the global population, and has notably nebulous borders. Moreover, the geographical imaginary of Asia itself is an orientalist fantasy (2016). As such, the dynamism of Asia demands ongoing reappraisal (Connors et al., 2017), especially regarding the ways in which it is affected by and affects global flows of culture, finance, and politics.

In this collection, the papers demonstrate how tourism geographies reflect these flows of socio-cultural and political-economic flows in a particularly visible ways, where tourists and the tourism industry are dramatically swept up in the swirl of geopolitical repositionings. Given the economic and political prominence of the industry in the region, the authors address a range of shifts characterized by the ‘Asian Century’ through critically engaged and empirically rich accounts of tourism in Asia and the Pacific. The papers consider what the transition into the Asian Century means for some of the most urgent issues of our time such as sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, and environmental change. They also critique Anglo-Western centrism in tourism theory and call on tourism scholars to make radical shifts toward more inclusive epistemology and praxis. Building on these trends, in this introduction to the Special Issue, Tourism Geographies in the Asian Century, we highlight how the unfolding of the Asian Century has been underway over the past several decades. Further, the post-pandemic tourism landscape, we argue, will require the tourism practitioners and scholars to account for the radical recentering of geopolitical and political-economic power and the broader Asia pivot.

For tourism scholars, this is a clarion call to consider how tourism geographies are being reshaped by these wide-ranging shifts. Authors in this collection consider tourism as a lens through which to examine some of the most urgent political-economic, environmental, and geopolitical implications of this recentering of tourism geographies in the Asian Century. Tourism research has been notably affected by the continuing rise in research knowledge production out of Asia based universities (Qian et al., 2019). This contrasts with Pearce’s (2004) sentiments nearly two decades earlier where he cited limitations evident in theory development from Asia-Pacific based research and researchers. Pearce (2004, p. 66) was sanguine about regionally-based solutions to address the inequities suggesting that ‘the promise of a special kind of contribution to theoretical tourism innovation in research from the Asia-Pacific region lies in the cultural traditions of the researchers’ own countries’. Mura and Pahlevan Sharif (2015, p. 833) similarly encounter the binaries at the positivist-qualitative tourism research intersection in Southeast Asia citing that the status quo ‘needs to be understood in relation to complex historical colonialist and postcolonialist influences as well as global structures of power’.

Collectively, the papers in this issue advance scholarship on the multiple modalities and recenterings of critical tourism studies and tourism geographies in the Asian Century. The papers consider empirical and theoretical shifts that reflect this recentering in extant Asia-Pacific scholarship as well as the broader implications of the supercharging of global tourism out of the region. Using China as an exemplar, the rise of tourism in the everyday, as well as the ubiquity and predominance of Chinese tourists around the globe is not reflected in a commensurate production of relevant research, nor does it acknowledge the vast production of knowledge on tourism outside the English-language academic circuit, especially those published in Chinese (Xu et al., 2014). Recentering is akin to a reorienting of dominant discourses from the margins back to the centre. We envision this collection to be less about the particulars of tourism in the Asia-Pacific or the tourists from the Asia-Pacific, than about the political-economy and cultural politics of historical and contemporary research in the region. To recenter critical tourism scholarship requires maintaining an equilibrium between a strict anti-essentialism and an openness to accommodate diverse ways of knowing. This act of conciliation and transformation is beset with hegemonic and counter-hegemonic engagements. While scholars have long called for the incorporation of a range of culturally diverse conceptualizations, tourism research continues to be dominated by English language voices. Yet, as new technologies and modes of cross-cultural translation and exchange take hold, and the momentum shifts away from the Anglo-centric axis toward more inclusive and diverse standpoints, tourism scholarship is destined to take shape in unprecedented ways.

To be sure, in providing an entrée to this curated collection, it has been an oddly mournful yet reassuring exercise. Borne out of the 2018 Critical Tourism Studies Asia-Pacific (CTS-AP) Inaugural Conference at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia, and now in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, the significance of the themes addressed in this issue are more urgent than ever. The pandemic has hastened claims that the Asian century has further accelerated given the contrasting successes of many Asia-Pacific countries, especially as compared to their Euro-American counterparts (Park, 2020). The Asia-Pacific chapter of Critical Tourism Studies was first mooted with the desire to create the space for recognizing and engaging the plurality of tourism scholarship outside universalized Western discourses. There has long been a call in CTS to decenter ‘tourism’s intellectual universe’ with the ‘willing[ness] to learn from every knowledge tradition, from Africa, Asia and from indigenous peoples around the world’ (Pritchard & Morgan, 2007, p. 25). The Asian Century offers new opportunities to rethink and reconfigure contemporary tourism discourses. In this vein, Lee, Hongling and Mignolo argue that the project ‘is both challenging and necessary, as it invites us to re-conceptualize the past (i.e. existing and hegemonic narratives of the past) in the present’ (2015, p. 189), even as we recognise the critical need to avoid perpetuating its own insular thought in what Chang (forthcoming) describes as Asian-centrism.

In founding the broader Asia-Pacific chapter of Critical Tourism Studies in this time of crisis, we realise that our premises remain – our past lives and work as pre-pandemic scholars were inspired by the critical turn in tourism studies (Ateljevic et al., 2007, 2012) and responds to the call to ‘dispute hegemonic neoliberal ways of producing and disseminating tourism knowledge’ (Ayikoru et al., 2009). Many issues familiar to critical tourism scholars – race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability – have become increasingly visible through social movements, globally. The Black Lives Matter (BLM), Stop Asian Hate, Occupy Wallstreet, and Me Too movements in recent years brought about increasing awareness of identity politics and became triggers for many Asian societies to begin unpicking similar issues in their public domains. The papers in this collection similarly tackle this broad spectrum of issues, many of which have become increasingly visible in recent months. Critical tourism scholarship is characterized in part by a commitment to fundamentally question hegemonic knowledge making practices in the broader service of social justice and sustainable development agendas (Mura & Wijesinghe, 2021).

The issue begins by addressing the philosophical drivers and theoretical implications of recentering tourism research in the Asian Century. In Critical tourism studies: new directions for volatile times, Gibson (2019) outlines key themes and future research agendas for tourism in the Anthropocene. As human consumption exceeds planetary thresholds, he writes, three ‘unfurling forces’ are unleashed: ‘excess capital and its territorial fixes; excessive mobilities and accompanying sociomaterial struggles; and biopolitical limits and excesses’ (this issue). Despite the ongoing challenges of tourism encounters, Gibson also highlights the potential for tourism to become a space of empathy and learning from and with each other. Gibson’s work challenges us to think about the role of tourism in the economic and environmental crisis. In, What western tourism concepts obscure: intersections of migration and tourism in Indonesia, (Adams 2020; Adams et al., 2021) addresses how western concepts fail to account for the nuance of nonwestern experiences of migration and tourism in Indonesia. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and online research, she focuses on historically rooted Toraja travel for purposes of experiential/financial enrichment (merantau). By describing how Western identity categories of ‘tourist’ and ‘migrant’ do not fully capture the experiences of Indonesian global labor and education migrants as well people’s return to their homelands, her work breaks down these Western binaries and opens space for new, more culturally relevant tourism knowledges and practices. Tucker and Hayes (2019) further deconstruct western tourism binaries, in Decentering scholarship through learning with/from each ‘other’. They consider how we might cultivate a decentring of Anglo-Western-centrism in tourism scholarship. Based on a field school program in Pai, Thailand, they examine how Western and non-Western researchers engage with tourism dynamics. This practice facilitated opportunities to embody the notion of ‘being Other’ in the formation of tourism knowledge production. Their work not only highlights the hegemony of Western knowledge practices, but also the potential role of the ‘international classroom’ in creating counter-hegemonic scholarship. Finally, Chang (2019) examines the relationship between CTS and Asian tourism research in, ‘Asianizing the field’: questioning Critical Tourism Studies in Asia. His work identifies the role of CTS in challenging conventional concepts and theories in tourism studies. Focused on six critical points of entry, Chang addresses issues related to principle, language, authorship, concepts, emancipation, and pedagogy and pushes the boundaries of CTS by calling for a Critical Asian Tourism Studies that celebrates the relationship between CTS and Asian tourism scholarship.

The second tranche of papers focuses on the lived experience of tourism for communities whose lifestyles and well-being have become increasingly bound to tourism and where the ramifications of tourism expansion are felt firsthand. Minca and Roelofsen (2019) enquire into the biopolitical implications of Airbnb on stakeholder communities. While benignly couched in terms of the sharing economy, they unpack the socio-economic implications of the rating system as a mechanism that unevenly affects hosts and guests. The conceptual registers of home are further questioned in Cheong and Sin (2019) incisive piece on family tourism. They argue that critical inquiry into family tourism allows us to understand the role tourism plays in the reproduction of normative social ideas such as that of a family. Their piece captures the role of family tourism in a time when the practice is very much curtailed due to the current pandemic, thus offering the opportunity for future studies to consider what happens in its absence. Scheyvens and Laeis (2019) are similarly focused on the concerns of stakeholders. They draw attention to the possibilities of optimal outcomes of tourism development through closer more productive linkages between agricultural production. This is especially important in contexts where economic leakages hold considerable implications for stakeholder communities. Tarulevicz and Ooi (2019) describe the stubborn barriers of tourists’ food preferences. They address how food is appropriated in place-making practices in ways that are often hierarchical and perpetuate historically rooted racisms. Tourism expansion highlights and intensifies the contradictions at play where the ‘authenticity’ of food can become sanitized and regulated in the interests of tourist safety. In rural Japan, Progano et al. (2020) highlight how visitors shape the pilgrimage experience and the implications this has for host communities. This can have enormous implications for destination managers and communities in peripheral places who often lack the wherewithall and capacity to adapt quickly to the changing demands of tourists. Finally, Mostafanezhad addresses tourism during the annual ‘smoky season’ in northern Thailand. She describes how environmental narratives about the causes and effects of seasonal air pollution are reshaping rural and urban relations, especially between farmers and tourism practitioners whose livelihoods are threatened by the circulation of particular matter. Her article brings emerging work at the intersection of urban political ecology and new materialism to bear on tourism to reveal the more-than human sociality of the tourism industry.

The special issue dovetails with two papers that address the conference as a space of knowledge production and politics. Apropos to the CTS-AP Inaugural Conference that itself aimed to decentre knowledge production and build a more inclusive scholarship in tourism spaces, these papers push the boundaries of traditional ‘fieldsites’ in tourism geographies. Zhang and Zhang (2020) highlight how Chinese scholars are increasingly pressed to join the fray in established ‘Western’ conferencing circuits while negotiating their own research within the context of their cultural traditions and identities. Rowen (2019) goes one step further to suggest that geopolitical shifts between state actors can themselves have a direct influence the social production of academic conferences. Both papers home in on the increasingly significant role Chinese academics play in the international academic community (whether based in China or of Chinese national or ethnic relations). Each paper ethnographically highlights the politics of academic knowledge production, publications, and conferences. They also remind us of the often-nuanced power dynamics of our field sites, collaborations, and publishing practices. Efforts to develop a more inclusive and pluralised tourism studies requires that we ask ourselves difficult questions of how and where we position CTS-AP as an intellectual community.

The special issue concludes with two pieces considering our work against the current COVID-19 pandemic – the first highlighting the varied outcomes of the pandemic in Southeast Asia, where Adams et al (2020) outline four trends that have proliferated throughout the region in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic including livelihood diversification, ecosystem regeneration, cultural revitalization, and domestic tourism development. These trends highlight the shifting tourism landscape and offer insight into what Southeast Asia’s post-pandemic tourism landscape may hold. Finally, an Afterword by established Asianist Tim Oakes (2020) then critically questions the heightened relevance of this project against two interrelated issues – the current geopolitical tensions between USA and China, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. He argues that it is now ‘crucial to recognize how attention to the politics of knowledge, in turn, reveals the need for a reset on how we conceive criticality itself’. These four concluding papers highlight the competing tensions in the current structure of academia. As CTS scholars endeavour to create hopeful and inclusive scholarship (Ateljevic et al., 2007, 2012; Pernecky, 2020), in the act of naming, we also – albeit inadvertently – construct new boundaries around what constitutes ‘critical’ in tourism studies. The practical impossibility of accounting for the full range of knowledge making practices will continue to challenge the CTS collective. Indeed, how to account for this diversity is at the core of these papers where authors collectively ask, whose knowledge counts and to what end?

As scores of Asian tourists challenged the Western normative assumptions, they are now conspicuously absent in once overtouristed sites. The family vacations that Cheong and Sin (2019) posit as fundamental to the imagination of a ‘happy family’ in Singapore where they have limited time together at home has all but flipped around – during the pandemic, home was one of the only places Singapore residents were bound to. Conferences around the globe that Zhang and Zhang (2020), and Rowen (2019) discuss have fallen like dominoes in their cancelations and postponements, making the February 2020 second biennial CTS-AP Conference at Wakayama University in Japan one of the last international tourism research conferences of that year. As critical tourism scholars, we are faced with an unprecedented situation, even as the pandemic looks set to become globally endemic and the true extent of its fullest impacts are only beginning to emerge, with more to surface in the years ahead.

At Wakayama in February 2020, alongside anxieties and apprehensions of what turned out to be just the beginning of an outbreak of what was then an unnamed pathogen, diligent hand-washing and sanitising ensued religiously amidst the uncertainty and fear. For many, the conference commenced what would eventually become an epoch moment in our personal and professional lives. Yet, there was palpable camaraderie, community, and a sense of togetherness despite the looming threat to our very understanding of tourism as an industry, practice, and academic enterprise. Casting a gaze forward, the third CTS-AP conference is scheduled to be hosted at Vietnam National University, Hanoi in December of 2022. Whether academic research and conferences will have resumed by then remains in limbo. That the world faces increasing turmoil is abundantly clear. Yet, amidst the disruption to the everyday, it is hope and compassion, but also political-economic restructuring that is needed to reset the tourism industry in more sustainable, equitable, and ethical directions (Brouder, 2020; Cheer, 2020; Crossley, 2020; Lapointe, 2020; Lew et al., 2020; Mostafanezhad, 2020a, 2020b; Tomassini & Cavagnaro, 2020). While in no uncertain terms, the pandemic has forever changed the tourism industry as we once knew it, it is our hope that we can collectively build on the momentum of the inclusive scholarship that CTSAP is renowned for (Edelheim, 2020; Pernecky, 2020) as we pause to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of tourism in a post-pandemic Asian Century.

Disclosure statement

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