Promise-making with rural tourism : a temporal perspective on rural development in China

Abstract

This article focuses on “not-yet successfully touristified villages” in rural China. While rural tourism has been on the rise resent years, many villages have not yet benefited from the tourism growth but mire in aborted or suspended projects. Through an ethnographic case study of a northern Chinese village, we reveal how the preparatory process of tourism has reshaped a village long before tourists or gentrifiers arrive. Conceptualizing this process as “promise-making”, we demonstrate how stalled projects operate in half-voltage and constantly recalibrate local people’ affective bonds with the future. This self-renewal ability dose not substantiate its legitimacy; rather, we argue that the protracted suspension not only generates ambivalent experiences of villagers but also subjects villagers to protracted uncertainties. Moreover, we find that the structural exclusion is not just a tourism consequence but begins from the project conceptual stage. By foregrounding the conditions, mechanisms, characteristics, and influences of the promise-making regime powered by rural tourism, this article offers a temporal perspective to explicate Chinese rural development.