Politics and tourism promotion: Hong Kong’s myth making

• Critically analyses how a Destination Marketing Organization signifies territory through myths.
• Reveals how DMO uses myths to promote Hong Kong as socio-culturally apart from China.
• Highlights how tourism marketing promotes a unique hybrid identity of Hong Kong.
• Explores the political undertones in the tourism promotion of Hong Kong.
• Suggests how destinations exercise power of contestation through tourism.

By using “crisis of identity” as background, this study analyses how post-colonial Hong Kong relies on myths that are grounded in its complex, centuries-old socio-cultural political heritage to convey through tourism an identity different and separate from that of China. This qualitative inquiry, which relies on both online and printed promotional documents reinforced by primary data collected through in-depth interviews, proposes an explanation of the symbolic representation of tourism through four sequential myths. The article concludes that Hong Kong exploits its colonial past to create an identity that enhances its “local Chineseness” with a Western flavor and positions the territory to assume an increasingly hybrid identity to avoid being just another Chinese city.