Chin Ee Ong, Hui Wu, Chaozhi Zhang
Drawing on fieldwork at Jiuzhaigou, this paper examines discursive power in a key Chinese tourism landscape and its post-disaster recovery. Using a Foucauldian framework, it extends Nyíri’s arguments of ‘scenic-spots’ and their associated tourism and landscape rationalities to Jiuzhaigou’s contested post-disaster recovery. Nyíri’s concept of scenic-spot is a state-designated, professionally managed tourism territory in China where landscapes including local cultures are administratively bounded, engineered, interpreted and regulated to produce an authorised, marketable sightseeing experience. Drawing on his account of tourism as a site of cultural authority and state governmentality, it examines how post-earthquake interventions are organised around producing an authorised way of seeing that remake the landscape as legible, orderly and consumable. In this framing, ‘beauty’ becomes a governing objective that coordinates technical, administrative and narrative work. The governing objective of beauty also resulted in the restoration of the post-earthquake landscape. Consequently, competing rationalities and interests such as minority beliefs and geological logics were sidelined in favour of a landscape that is geared towards a consumption of specific touristic aesthetic forms, that of a pristine landscape dotted with photogenic peoples.