Retail tours in China for overseas Chinese: Soft power or hard sell?

• First study to examine retail tours in China targeted at overseas Chinese.
• Augmented autoethnographic approach used to identify motivations and perceptions.
• Geopolitical soft power and economic hard sell concurrently inform experiences.
• Hard sell negatively or positively mediates the success of the projected soft power.
• The term sellscape is introduced to describe holistic retail tourism contexts.

We used analytical auto-ethnography to explore the package tour experience of overseas Chinese in China. Soft power and hard sell both emerge as integral aspects of this sellscape. Soft power capitalizes on participant motivations of cost, culture, curiosity and consumerism and is manifest in high quality and low cost facilities and services. Hard sell occurs in shopping venues and is characterized by aggressive sales tactics and captive settings. Dissatisfaction with hard sell, however, is ‘negotiated’ and does not outweigh overall satisfaction, suggesting that tours contribute positively to the geopolitical sustainability of the Chinese state. Optimal mobilization, however, is more likely through more explicit government involvement.