Tourism as a territorial strategy: The case of China and Taiwan

• Tourism is a political technology of state territorialization.
• Tourism reciprocally produces nation-states and national citizens.
• Cross-Strait tourism is producing ambiguous and multiple sensations of stateness in Taiwan.
• Tourism is aggravating political contradictions between China and Taiwan.
• Tourism is a fundamentally unpredictable instrument of foreign policy.

This paper examines the cultural and territorial politics of the rapid post-2008 growth in tourism from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to Taiwan. Additionally, this paper presents an innovative theoretical argument that tourism should be viewed as a technology of state territorialization; that is, as a mode of social and spatial ordering that produces tourists and state territory as effects of power.Based on fieldwork conducted in Taiwan in 2012, it explores the engagement of PRC tourists with Taiwanese hosts, political representations of Taiwan and China, the territorializing effects of tourism, the production of multiple sensations of stateness, and the possibility that tourism is aggravating contradictions between the different territorialization programs of China and Taiwan.