Award Winner for Volume 8
Red Tourism and National Identity among the Chinese Middle Class during the Pandemic: An Investigation Based on Semi-structured Interviews
Since 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak has shocked and impacted the global tourism industry. In China, outbound travel completely halted and domestic travel dominated the travel market. To control the spread of the virus, address complex international circumstances, and enhance national identity and social cohesion, the Chinese government promoted domestic red tourism. The Chinese middle class, who preferred traveling abroad before the pandemic, became the main force for red tourism. Through semi-structured interviews, this study investigates red tourism and the national identity of the Chinese middle class during the pandemic. The results show that the interviewees’ motivations to engage in red tourism were to increase knowledge, experience life, enjoy leisure and recreation activities, and partake in interpersonal communication. They were most impressed by the physical landscapes, symbols, and physical practices they experienced, and many of these experiences were mediated by the means of virtual reality. Red tourism helped create a common historical memory, national pride, and political party identity and enhanced the participants’ sense of well-being, strengthening their national identity. The findings provide a new perspective for examining the national identity of the Chinese middle class and contribute empirical evidence from China to the study of the relationship between tourism and national identity after the pandemic.
Red Tourism and National Identity among the Chinese Middle Class during the Pandemic represents a significant milestone in my ongoing research on the everyday practices of China’s middle class. Set against the backdrop of COVID-19 and the Chinese government’s promotion of domestic red tourism, this article investigates how individuals in the middle class—once frequent participants in global leisure culture—engaged with newly imposed ideological and spatial constraints. Through a close analysis of semi-structured interviews, I demonstrate that participants neither passively absorbed state narratives nor rejected them outright. Instead, they engaged with the performative elements of red tourism—symbolic spaces, revolutionary rituals, virtual reality displays—through acts of mimicry, playful distancing, and selective appropriation. These practices reveal an ambivalent but generative space between conformity and critique.
This work is theoretically informed by my longstanding interest in how ideology is lived, negotiated, and subtly resisted through routine cultural practices. Rather than treating the Chinese middle class as a homogeneous or politically disengaged group, I approach it as a socially situated and reflexive stratum whose aspirations, anxieties, and affective investments are key to understanding broader transformations in state-society relations. The article thus contributes not only to the literature on tourism and nationalism but also to broader sociological inquiries into the formation of political subjectivities under authoritarian conditions.
Methodologically, this study enabled me to refine an interdisciplinary approach that bridges cultural sociology, media studies, and political theory. In particular, it reaffirmed the value of qualitative inquiry for uncovering latent meanings, emotional registers, and embodied modes of citizenship that often elude survey-based or policy-driven research. The process of conducting and analyzing interviews also deepened my commitment to methodological reflexivity and ethical engagement in fieldwork.
Looking ahead, this publication provides a crucial empirical and conceptual foundation for my current project on the democratic potential of China’s middle class. I intend to further explore how cultural practices—especially those mediated by digital technologies—participate in the production of meaning, the reweaving of power relations, and the (re)activation of civic imaginaries. Ultimately, this research aligns with my broader scholarly aim: to illuminate the subtle, often contradictory ways in which agency, identity, and political emotion are negotiated in constrained environments, and to better understand how seeds of transformation may be quietly sown within the fabric of the everyday.
—Abigail Qian Zho