| This dissertation illustrates the relationship between cultural landscape and ideology by examining China's booming tourism industry, especially the recent rise of "Red Tourism" in former Soviet base areas in Jiangxi Province. The examination is a reading of a changing cultural landscape as the visible text revealing invisible ideologies as well as human and institutional bearers of those ideologies. The landscape of Red Tourism in China is (re)shaped by, and is (re)shaping, the dynamic interaction of competing and co-existed ideologies in transition. I argue that Red Tourism is on the one hand an economic development strategy to generate power for tourism development in areas that are rich in "red resources" but much less privileged otherwise. On the other hand, Red Tourism serves as an ideological means to reassert state control in an era of transition when hegemony or ideological conformity has given way to pluralism or even confusion to a certain extent. Conversely, such assertion of power is constrained and conditioned by "the internal laws" of market economy, hence (tourism) development "with Chinese characteristics." In other words, the proletariat revolution in a nutshell, with its legacies in both visual and audio forms, is marketed as a Red Tourism product for economic development and ideological manipulation. On all levels, Red Tourism is also a medium through which the individual and collective locals represent their identity, a means by which they make sense of who they are in what they do, and by which they position themselves in relation to the rest of the nation. |
