The politicization of place: chronotopes, authenticity, and semioscaping Fujialu as a site of “red tourism” in China

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the linguistic and semiotic construction and transformation of Fujialu, a rural village in eastern China, as an “authentic” site of “red tourism” related originally to historical sites and places that record China’s revolution led by the Communist Party of China. Based on photographs and semi-structured interviews, this paper applies the concept of chronotope as an analytical and interpretive approach to examine processes of linguistic and semiotic authentication and acts of spatiotemporal configuration. Findings of this study unfold excessive constraints of sociopolitical ideologies in the sign activity as well as the village’s agency in this process, suggesting that the semiotization of space for tourism is not inevitably driven by economic but sociopolitical purposes. This paper thus adds a new insight to tourism literature that has not yet paid much attention to the influence of sociopolitical forces on place-making but is prevailingly taking commodification as a dominant factor structuring tourism discourse in today’s era of mobility and globalization.

KEYWORDS:

• Chronotopes
• authenticity
• politicization
• commodification
• semiotic landscape
• red tourism

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Zhixin Liu, my research assistant, for his help with data collection. My deepest gratitude goes to the two anonymous referees for their useful comments. Any remaining shortcomings are entirely mine.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Post-socialist China is characterized with institutional transformation of the state-socialist society into a “state capitalist” system, i.e. from command planning to marketization, with the underlying socialist ideology remaining unchanged.

2 Red genes refer to the revolutionary spirituality and history of the CPC as a kind of political and cultural inheritance.

3 I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to the relation of chronotope to place and to Al-Alawi’s (2022) work.

4 The village was not formed until late Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and it didn’t record China’s revolution led by the CPC.

5 While the date on which it was initiated is somewhat difficult to trace, this socialist propaganda phrase is associated with the notion “不忘初心、牢记使命” firstly delivered by General Secretary Xi Jingping to the 12th National People’s Congress in March 2013.

6 Upheld as essential part of Chinese socialist ideologies, the socialist core values include “富强” (lit., prosperity), “民主” (lit., democracy), “文明” (lit., civility), “和谐” (lit., harmony), “自由” (lit., freedom), “平等” (lit., equality), “公正” (lit., justice), “法制” (lit., rule with laws), “爱国” (lit., patriotism), “敬业” (lit., dedication), “诚信” (lit., integrity), and “友善” (lit., kindness).