The Poverty of Tourism under Mobilizational Developmentalism in China

In China tourism has been promoted not only as a passport to development in general, but also as an effective instrument to help the poor, and to regulate the serious regional disparity between the coastal and inland areas. In practice, tourism has been adopted popularly by local state elites as an important local economic development strategy, especially in poverty-stricken areas. This article studies the pattern of tourism development in China through the historically specific institutional dynamics of mobilizational developmentalism, which is generated from a blending of mobilizational bureaucracy with developmentalism. With the analytical framework of mobilization developmentalism, this article studies a case of ``industrialization of tourism'' in which the Miao New Year was promoted by a nationally designated poor county as a tourism-led development project. On one hand, this article analyzes how local bureaucrats at various levels of the government responded to the political mobilization of a tourism-led development project. On the other hand, this study explores how local communities respond to tourism projects mobilized from above. This article argues that mobilizational developmentalism shapes a specific set of political, economic and cultural processes among local state elites, tourist operators, and local communities in developing tourism in China.