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Red Tourism in China: Propaganda, Space, Commodification

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Red Tourism in China: Propaganda, Space, Commodification RED TOURISM IN CHINA: PROPAGANDA, SPACE, COMMODIFICATION BY CHUNFENG LIN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications and Media in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor John C. Nerone, Chair Professor James Hay Professor Robert W. McChesney Professor Cameron R. McCarthy Professor Poshek Fu ABSTRACT This dissertation is about Red Tourism and propaganda. Red Tourism refers to tourism of the People’s Republic of China in which people visit tourist spots with historical significance to either the Communist Party of China (CPC) or the Chinese revolution. A heritage tourism, Red Tourism is a kind of oxymoron. It is a yoking together of two extraordinarily powerful drivers in the cultural language surrounding China. On the one hand, “Red” is associated with ideology, discipline, and loyalty combined with a history of authentic struggle and liberation. On the other hand, tourism designates an ongoing process of capitalization. Eerily, this oxymoronicality of Red Tourism epitomizes the cultural imagination of contemporary China, in which the Chinese state seems simultaneously to be engaged in mining the past for its lucrative images and narrative resources as well as calculating a future linked to a kind of “Red” economy where propaganda/xuanchuan roots, morphs, and thrives. Xuanchuan, propaganda’s counterpart in China, means “disseminating purposeful information,” and is folkloristic in nature, associated with good things and deeds. Nevertheless, this is rarely understood, in part because the way we see propaganda has been fixed; scholars treat propaganda as a method, a technique, and/or a practice, devoting much attention to journalism, the news industry, the media system, and censorship and little to the social space of propaganda. This book is meant to fill that gap. It examines Red Tourism in connection with the transforming power relations between the state and the capitalist, the socialist past and the capitalized present in the communication arena against the backdrop of the world’s second largest economy. I ii argue that Red Tourism is a social space comprised of all sorts of political pathways and communication networks. As such, Red Tourism is both produced and productive: it was produced by both physical space such as cities, tourist sites, and museums, and abstract space including histories, ideologies, collective memories, (post)socialist nostalgia, social imaginaries and so forth. At the same time, it is (re)producing all of these physical and non-physical networks by following distinctive mechanisms combining the dominant ideology and the capitalist mode of production. It calls for a new theoretical framework and approach that does not belong to traditional propaganda studies. In a number of ways this study aims to go beyond existing work in propaganda studies by illustrating the following: that propaganda is a social space; that there is a propaganda culture in China; that tourism is a popular site of propaganda; that the capitalist can make a profit off of popular propaganda by commodifying and selling it in the market; that although ostensibly commercial and nonideological, commodified propaganda can be even more ideologically powerful, hence, more propagandistic; that the partaking of surplus capital in the commodification of propaganda renders the social space of propaganda even more complicated; and that capitalism is, too, a driving force for the production of state propaganda. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to record my gratitude first of all to John Nerone, whose patience, witticisms, erudition, and friendship made my Illinois years a truly fulfilling sojourn. I am also very grateful to James Hay, Bob McChesney, Cameron McCarthy, and Poshek Fu who wholeheartedly supported my project from the outset and their invaluable advice and benevolent criticism helped me to eliminate many shortcomings of the project. Faculty at the Institute of Communications Research (ICR), especially Anghy Valdivia, Norm Denzin, and Kent Ono offered encouragement and support in the course of my work. Thanks also to ICR staff, especially to Theresa Harris for all her help. Many thanks also to my former Chinese journalist colleagues who arranged my access to other journalists and local officials, to all of whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude for their frankness and openness. Thanks also to my indispensable informants who are anonymized throughout the project due to the sensitive topic. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER TWO: THE PROBLEM OF PROPAGANDA … ………………………….....24 CHAPTER THREE: TOURISM AS A PROPAGANDA SYSTEM …………………........71 CHAPTER FOUR: THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF RED TOURISM …..…………........118 CHAPTER FIVE: THE SOCIAL SPACE OF RED TOURISM: THE YAN’AN CASE ..165 CHAPTER SIX: THE COMMODIFICATION OF PROPAGANDA (COP) ………..…..245 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION: THE PROPAGANDA STATE ………….………298 REFERENCES ………………………………………………………………...………...307 v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION This dissertation is about Red Tourism and propaganda. Red Tourism (hongse luyou) refers to tourism of the People’s Republic of China in which people visit tourist spots with historical significance to either the Communist Party of China (CPC) or the Chinese revolution. The profitability of this so-called “Red” economy has been phenomenal: according to The People’s Daily, “last year [2011] alone, China’s Red Tourism sites received 540 million visitors, counting for 20 percent of tourists in the country” (Jin, 2012). According to a governmental outline from 2011, by 2015 the national Red tourist travel number would exceed 800 million with an average annual growth of 15 percent, and increase the proportion to a quarter share of the total number of China domestic tourism; the consolidated revenue of Red Tourism would reach 200 billion yuan ($31 billion) with an average annual growth rate of 10 percent (Outline 2011–2015). Lately, the China’s Red Tourism wave has even reached out internationally. To accommodate the burning enthusiasm of Chinese Red tourists in Russia, Russian tourism authorities launched a special route called the “red circuit,” an eight-day tour across multiple Russian cities featured the life trajectory of Vladimir Lenin (Koreneva, 2015). A heritage tourism, Red Tourism is a kind of oxymoron. It is a yoking together of two extraordinarily powerful drivers in the cultural language surrounding China. On the one hand, “Red” is associated with ideology, discipline, and loyalty combined with a history of authentic struggle and liberation. On the other hand, tourism designates an ongoing process of capitalization. Eerily, this oxymoronicality of Red Tourism epitomizes the cultural imagination of contemporary China, in which the Chinese state 1 seems simultaneously to be engaged in mining the past for its lucrative images and narrative resources as well as calculating a future linked to a kind of “Red” economy where propaganda roots, morphs, and thrives. Nevertheless, this is rarely understood, in part because the way we see propaganda practice has been fixed; scholars treat propaganda as a method, a technique, and/or a practice, devoting much attention to journalism, the news industry, the media system, and censorship and little to the social space of propaganda. This research is meant to fill that gap. The study examines Red Tourism in connection with the transforming power relations between the state and the capitalist, the socialist past and the capitalized present in the communication arena against the backdrop of the world’s second largest economy. I argue that Red Tourism is a social space comprised of all sorts of political pathways and communication networks. As such, Red Tourism is both produced and productive: it was produced by both physical space such as cities, tourist sites, and museums, and abstract space including histories, ideologies, collective memories, (post)socialist nostalgia, social imaginaries and so forth. At the same time, it is (re)producing all of these physical and non-physical networks by following distinctive mechanisms combining the dominant ideology and the capitalist mode of production. It calls for a new theoretical framework and approach that does not belong to traditional propaganda studies. I adopted an interpretive approach invoked by two strands of Marxism that speak at times at cross purposes regarding the production of meanings and power relations. In the first strand, that of the contemporary Western Marxism of Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, there is a sophisticated reading of the production of superstructure not as a static, determined process but through dynamic mediation. They help rethink Red 2 Tourism not as simply a propaganda project determined by the Party’s ideology but a social space mediated by and mediating communications. The second strand, political economy, derived from classical Marxism, carries out inquiries into the relation, production, distribution and exchange of power in the capitalist mode of production. It is a useful tool to analyze the political-economic base of Red Tourism and related issues. Therefore, in this study I pursued what Robert Babe (2009, p. 5) refers to as “a dialectical middle ground,” integrating critical/cultural studies and political economy of communication. The concepts of propaganda, space, and commodification serve as both the cornerstones of the theoretical construct
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