As Beijing develops into a global city, high-rise banking and apartment buildings appear almost daily, while historical hutong neighborhoods have been destroyed to accommodate this development. At the same time, hutong tourism has become popular with Chinese and foreign tourists. While some have advocated tourism in the hutong as a strategy to ensure preservation and economic development, others argue that attention from tourists will inevitably change the lives of hutong residents. As the hutong are reconstructed through tourism, new cultural forms are produced under the ideal of "authenticity." These forms both reflect existing cultural values and produce new cultural possibilities. This paper analyzes the development of cultural tourism in the hutong based on ethnographic observations, secondary sources, and email interviews with hutong tourism business owners. My argument does not focus on whether the commodification of the hutong is inherently good or bad, but rather on the production and uses of authenticity in the hutong as well as interpretations of that ideal by different people at different times. I suggest that the debates over hutong tourism development in the capital illuminate the lack of consensus in Chinese discourse about what modern China is and ought to be.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04202010-124515 |
| Date | 13 May 2010 |
| Creators | Macasek, Jennifer S. |
| Contributors | Dr. Gabriella Lukacs, Dr. Hai Ren, Dr. Xinmin Liu, Dr. Young Rae Oum |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04202010-124515/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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