title: CRUISING A DISPUTED SEA: The Geopolitics of Tourism in the South China Sea
Creators: name: Huang, Yan
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Tourism
subject: FOS: Economics and business
subject: South China Sea (SCS)
subject: maritime policy
subject: Geopolitics

description: Territorial disputes in and over the South China Sea (SCS) are often regarded as a dangerous flashpoint in the Indo-Pacific with potentially serious global consequences. In the context of this territorial rivalry, tourism has been deployed by several littoral countries as a soft, civilian tactic to enact maritime territorialisation. Situated against this backdrop, this thesis serves as the first empirically-grounded and theoretically-engaged research to analyse the dynamic nexus between tourism and geopolitical territorialisation in the SCS. The thesis takes China’s tourism in the Xisha region as a case study and applies an ethnographic approach. More specifically, by moving away from a state-centric focus, this thesis integrates multiple scales of analysis to comprehensively examine tourism’s entanglements with the state’s practical and formal geopolitics and explore how tourism territorialisation is played out and experienced in an everyday context. For the territorial role and effect of tourism, this thesis presents a theoretical argument that tourism ought to be treated as a performative force of producing nationalised space and as an assemblage element affecting individuals’ geopolitical subjectivation in daily life. In a practical sense, I suggest that tourism should be considered as a constitutive dimension of the geopolitical restructuring processes in the SCS and as a dynamic geopolitical process on its own, which is informed by, and at the same animates, the multiple scales of geopolitical relations. The research findings presented in this thesis show that tourism is more than an enterprise monopolised and unilaterally pursued by Beijing to achieve the narrow pursuit of state-led territorialisation of the SCS. A range of state, substate, non-state, and even non-human, actors are found to participate in and inform maritime territorialisation through tourism. These diverse actors generally have their own agendas, interests, and pursuits in tourism development, which are not always in line with the state intentions and official prescriptions. Through process-tracking the development history of tourism, this thesis shows that China’s launch of tourism in Xisha is precisely a product resulting from domestic political and economic imperatives and stimulations of the then regional geopolitical tensions. Domestically, the Hainan provincial government is found to be an important sub-state actor who introduced the tourism territorialisation idea into the state’s maritime policy and continues to exert significant influence on the implementation and operation of Beijing’s tourism strategy in the region. Notably, the research demonstrates that China’s SCS tourism is not a static undertaking by identifying a prominent evolution of the roles of tourism in state maritime policy. Since the implementation of the ‘One Belt and One Road Initiative’ in late 2013, Beijing has gradually positioned tourism as a potential peacemaker for facilitating pan-SCS economic cooperation. Investigating how tourism is concretely practised and performed on the ground by state-owned tourism enterprises, another important substate-actor, the research sheds light on how territoriality and sovereignty are enacted, materialised, and performed on a daily basis. The research reveals Xisha tourism has been largely normalised as a self-sustaining corporate operation with government intervention decreasing over time. Despite being subordinated to governments, these state-owned tourism enterprises are far from docile policy-undertakers, but are calculating entities seeking to maximise their corporate interests through the tourism industry. Through a closer study of specific tour structures and patterns of organisation, the discourses, representation, performances, materiality, and spatial-temporal techniques of control employed by tourism operators, the thesis illustrates that Xisha tourism is carefully vetted, politically oriented, highly regimented, deliberately managed, elaborately designed, and performatively constituted in order to better curate tourists’ experiences and, in doing so, better produce territory. Tourism operators politicise the tourism landscape of the SCS, thereby choreographing the entire destination to be a complete geopolitical stage. Furthermore, the thesis interrogates the micro-geopolitical experiences and encounters of tourists, investigating the territorial effects and affects of tourism on the personal level. For this, a specific concept, ‘territorial socialisation’, is developed to capture such an effect. The research demonstrates that tourists are pragmatic geopolitical actors rather than passive pawns of the state. Their geopolitics experiences through tourism are connected to, and embedded in, their extensive daily perceptions and experiences of the benefits of China’s national rising and of the unjust international orders on handling territorial disputes. By translating the remote ‘imagined homeland’ into real existence and enabling an intimate, tangible, and affirmative encounter with national territories, tourism works on the emotional, embodied, and cognitive dimensions of territorial socialisation. Importantly, the vast and flowing physicality of the sea is found to complicate tourists’ maritime territorial identity. In addition to the more apparent political and economic schemes behind the development and maintenance of SCS tourism, and in view of the intimate relations between everyday tourism practices and geopolitics, this thesis suggests that tourism is a mundane and intimate way in which people regularly live geopolitics in their daily lives. Together, the empirical discussion of the thesis demonstrates the agency of tourism in configuring the geopolitical process and shows the mutual constitution of tourism and geopolitics in general and the interdependence of tourism and territorialisation in the SCS in particular. By unravelling the multiple facets of the geopolitics of China’s SCS tourism, this thesis contributes to the scholarship on tourism geopolitics, maritime territorialisation, territorial nationalism, and the SCS dispute. It also offers practical insights into the potential ramifications of tourism development, and its implications for our understanding of the geopolitics of the SCS.