UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY. Marketing and Shaping Shanghai in Travel Writings: A Critical Analysis of the Evolving

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1 UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Marketing and Shaping Shanghai in Travel Writings: A Critical Analysis of the Evolving Tourism Discourse in the New York Times Travel Section by Yifan Wang A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE CALGARY, ALBERTA SEPTEMBER, 2016 Yifan Wang 2016

2 Abstract Tourism discourse has been affirmed to be a site where tourist destinations are constantly invented, reinvented, produced and reproduced. More importantly, tourism discourse constantly undergoes variation along with the changing social context and the unfixed power relations between host and guest society. By using critical discourse analysis to analyze the New York Times travel writings covering Shanghai and tracing the evolving discourse, it is discovered that the newspaper increasingly projects the image of Shanghai as a metropolis for diverse consumption by adopting commercialized language, and consequently cultivates a homogenized discourse and routinized ways of viewing Shanghai. It is concluded that the changing discourse suggests the newspaper s closer relationship with the tourism industry, and the travel writings have become the product of consensual marketing for profitability and reflect the collaborative relationship between the newspaper and the tourism industry of Shanghai. Keywords: tourism discourse, travel writings, Shanghai, consensual marketing ii

3 Acknowledgements Although the space is limited here to mention every name, I would like to express my deep gratitude to those who helped me in one way or another along my way of pursuing graduate study. First, I want to thank Dr. Barbara Schneider for guiding me and encouraging me. Without her keeping me on the right track and motivating me when I felt lost, I wouldn t be able to finish this paper. I also want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my parents. Although they were in China, their caring words and constant support calmed me and sustained me as if they were by my side. Thanks also to my colleagues and friends for providing helpful resources, sharing important experiences and encouraging me. Finally, I want to thank those who have me in their mind and wish me luck, no matter in Calgary or in my home town. This paper can be done because of the collaboration of everyone in my life. iii

4 Table of Contents Abstract... ii Acknowledgements... iii Table of Contents... iv Chapter 1 Introduction...1 Research Question...1 Background...2 Literature Review...6 Theory and Method...7 Key Findings...8 Chapter 2 Literature Review...11 An Introduction to Tourism Theories...12 The Significance of Studying Tourism Discourse Critically...14 The Significance of Analyzing Media Text in Travel Journalism...16 The Representational Power of Travel Journalism...19 Reinforcing preferred representations of target readers Power relations, ideologies and tourism representations Homogenization and stereotyping in travel writings Representations of Asian Destinations and China...24 Conclusion...28 Chapter 3 Theory & Method...29 An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)...29 Discourse Mediating Social Reality...31 Orders of Discourse and Intertextuality...33 CDA as Interdisciplinary Approaches...35 Applications of CDA in Previous Research...36 iv

5 Rationale for Choosing CDA...40 Rationale for Choosing the NYT Travel Writings...43 Data Collection and Corpus Design...45 Procedure of Data Analysis...46 Chapter 4 Analysis...50 Heavier Weight of Consumption in Writings...53 Culture and history are commodified as symbols to enhance consumption Western lifestyle and consumption become dominant themes Trend story brings new consumption themes Heavier Marketing Language that Embellishes Shanghai...69 Marketing orientation in later articles Creating a pastiche of contrasting images to promote otherness The marketing language of 36 Hours in Shanghai Chapter 5 Conclusion...85 A Stereotypical Shanghai Grounded in Consumer Culture...85 Consensual Marketing and the Evolving Power Relation...88 Limitations of the Research and Recommendations for Future Study...93 Significance of the Study...94 References...96 v

6 Chapter 1 Introduction Research Question Tourism being a place where difference or cultural otherness is produced and celebrated (MacCannell, 2013), the study of tourism discourse can yield valuable understandings about the construction of the other through the lens of communication study. Tourism discourse has been affirmed to be a site where tourist destinations are constantly invented, reinvented, produced and reproduced (Duim et al., 2005). Their representations reflect the ideology about how destinations should be looked at. The inclusion and exclusion of themes and the narratives about destinations in tourism discourse are inevitably interwoven with larger sociopolitical contexts and broader discourse, whether intentionally or unconsciously related by travel writers. More importantly, tourism discourse constantly undergoes variation along with the unfixed power relation between the societies that the host and guest come from. From this perspective, studying the shifts and changes that happen in the tourism discourse of a destination can provide a glimpse and add to the understanding about such phenomena. From the specific example of Shanghai, studying the tourism discourse of the city in a mainstream US newspaper can help to get a better insight about the unfixed power relation between China and the US. The research questions guiding this research are as follows: 1) how have the representations of Shanghai as a tourist destination changed in the New York Times (NYT) travel writings? 2) what do these changes imply about the ideological underpinnings and the dynamic relationship between China and the US? Although there are previous studies about how China or other Asian areas are represented in Western tourism discourse, little has been done about the representations of Shanghai specifically. Furthermore, the contested colonial history and diversified social reality of 1

7 Shanghai can bring more complexity to addressing the research questions, which are introduced in the following section. Background Shanghai lies on the Yangtze River Delta where China s main waterway runs into the Pacific Ocean. Shanghai is one of the direct-controlled municipalities of the People s Republic of China (PRC) and the transport hub with the world s busiest container port today. It grew in Figure 1. Shanghai s location in China map. (From shanghai/map.htm) importance in the nineteenth century because of European recognition of its favorable port location and economic potential, which led Shanghai to be a global financial center in the early twentieth century. After the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing at the close of the Opium Wars in 1842, foreign settlements and concessions started to be established in Shanghai, which brought the makeover of its city landscape and a variety of Western culture and architecture styles. Celebrated as the Paris of the East, Shanghai became a metropolis intertwining with myth and fable (Campanella, 2008, p. 59) in the Western imagination. By the close of the nineteenth century, Shanghai was Asia s most modern metropolis, and it came to its heyday in the 1930s when it was the financial hub of the Asia Pacific and a center of commerce between East and 2

8 West. During the flourishing time between 1920 to 1930, many of the landmark buildings of Western architecture style were constructed (Bergère, 2009). Among them were the neoclassical buildings built at the Bund, a waterfront area deemed as the most lauded symbol (Campanella, 2008, p. 61) of Shanghai. Besides the Bund, the most symbolic and globally famous part of the old Shanghai back then was comprised of the Chinese Municipality and the French Concession, a colonial area that was directly under foreign administration, whose top official was appointed by French government (Wasserstrom, 2006). After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the old Shanghai experienced huge transformation for the construction of a socialist society. The government attempted to blot out the colonial vestige and colonial history of Shanghai. Furthermore, the once famous landmarks such as the Bund were under strict restriction of visiting (Henriot, 2010). Colonial relics were regarded as corrupted and the representation of consumption, which was against the ideology of socialist society, therefore had been cleansed from official publications for a long time before the reform movement started in the 1990s (Henriot, 2010). Even after 1978, a significant year marked by the historical policy changes which brought China s international tourism development, the old Shanghai was still much backgrounded in tour guides and other official publications (Zhang, Pine & Qiu, 2000). Nonetheless, colonial relics remained to be one of the prominent themes in Western travel journalism, which was mixed with the themes about the traditional facets of Shanghai so as to build an exotic image and the idiosyncrasy of the city. One of the examples is the New York Times travel section, since its travel writings frequently drew upon colonial history and nostalgic past of Shanghai to attract readers. However, such representation of Shanghai as the Asian metropolis tied up with exoticism and colonial nostalgia gradually changed roughly after 1990, the year that Shanghai was assigned with a significant role 3

9 in the massive economic development of China (Bergère, 2009). A shift took place from foregrounding Shanghai as the exotic Far East metropolis and Paris of the East to foregrounding its image as a Chinese city in hyper-development. After the new millennium, the travel writings basically project the image of Shanghai as an energetic modern metropolis that is no longer bound up with its colonial past and nostalgia. With the city s leaders becoming aware of the value and profitability of Shanghai s urban legacy, a number of colonial buildings of old Shanghai appeared on a preservation list drawn up in 1991 and were saved from destruction (Bergère, 2009). These old buildings that used to be emblematic of the controversial past of Shanghai started to be viewed from a different perspective by the city s leaders, and were renovated to rejuvenate Shanghai s glamour (Henriot, 2010). Stripped of their historical meanings and colonial past, the buildings started to be reinterpreted for promoting both domestic and international consumption (Henriot, 2010). Furthermore, the old Shanghai has been transformed to be a sanitized symbol of this new modern city and officially defined as a part of its cosmopolitan spirit as East meets West by Shanghai Municipal Tourism Administration (Meet-In-Shanghai.net, the Official Shanghai Travel Website, 2016). Such cosmopolitan identity is shaped by the city s leaders for the purpose of drawing foreign investment and boosting mass tourism, which brings annually over 1 million visitors to the city (Bergère, 2009). Along with traditional constructions, many of the colonial buildings have turned to be functional constructions such as shopping malls and art galleries that stimulate consumption. It is pointed out by Bergère (2009) that the city s leaders emphasized more on constructing a modern landscape of Shanghai than on restoring its historical authenticity. Furthermore, along with the renovation of the historical buildings which were a part of Shanghai s colonial legacy, a series of skyscrapers and new modern landmarks rose up during 4

10 the 1990s. Therefore, the city landscape of Shanghai has been renewed by the combination of both the modern and historical, Western and Eastern style. The historical monuments are dehistoricized and preserved for the current search of Shanghai for a new modern identity so as to reconnect with the world for its economic resurgence (Henriot, 2010). Such mode of development called new Shanghai capitalism (Bergère, 2009, p. 433) and its new identity is reflected in the NYT travel writings, as the colonial past is seldom drawn upon to build the exoticism of Shanghai after Emphasizing consumption and the modernized city landscape, the tourism discourse of Shanghai has been refreshed and detached from exoticism and colonial nostalgia. Moreover, different from many other Chinese cities where modernization process is deemed as a disruption to local landscape and old neighborhoods (Wang et al., 2009), Shanghai s modernization is basically celebrated by the NYT travel section. Subjectively constructed and affected by political, social, economic and institutional practices and realities (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998, p. 17), the representations of Shanghai reveal that the ideologies and power relation beneath the writings have changed. Through an analysis of the travel writings published in the NYT travel section, it is concluded here that the tourism discourse is now dominated by marketing language that promotes consumption, which is grounded in the consumer culture of the USA. Furthermore, these travel writings form a routinized way of seeing Shanghai as a destination for a variety of consumption. Themes about culture, history and local lifestyle are substituted by those about shopping, eating and visiting bars, which aligns with the mutual goal of achieving reciprocal benefits for both the newspaper and the local economy. And such change reflects the shift to a collaborative relationship (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998, p. 5) between the US newspaper and the tourism industry of 5

11 Shanghai, which has turned the NYT travel writings to be a product of consensual marketing in the age of globalization. Literature Review This research adopts the position that tourism in the age of globalization should be examined in a critical stance, as tourism is potentially leading the valuation and revaluation of places and plays a highly powerful role in transforming space, place and local culture (Hollinshead, 2007). Furthermore, this research is situated at the area of critical tourism studies, and specifically studies tourism discourse as a communicative process that mediates the way in which people view and perceive the world, and potentially affects the social practices of tourists. One of the important areas of literature that I explored was the scholarship based on examining the tourism discourse as a semiotic production of global capitalism, which gives rise to the emergence of recent studies that examine tourism from the perspective of understanding it as symbolic practices associated with language, communication and imagery. Besides that, the available literature was also examined from the perspective of considering tourism discourse as a site that reveals power relations and ideologies of difference. On the other hand, it is also pointed out by scholars who study tourism under the context of globalization that tourism has been transformed into consumerism, and commodified as a part of the globalization processes that produce homogenized destination notions. Therefore, an important part of the literature examines the shifting role and the nuanced stance of nowadays travel journalism that is under the influence of and reflects such commodification of tourism, which helps me to ground my analysis of travel journalism in the larger context. Many previous studies start from the textual dimension of tourism discourse and aim to generalize destination image, representational frame or dominant ideologies beneath destination 6

12 representations. Examining media text from a development perspective, my research attempts to answer the question of how media representations evolve along with the dynamically changing social context. Although the recent scholarly attention focuses on a more static destination image constructed by media text, such as travel journalism, tour guidebooks and travel magazines, the scholarship provides me with a foundation to build upon in seeking to examine the relationship between destination representation, ideologies and sociopolitical context. It is accepted by scholars and taken as the starting point of their studies that tourism representations should be regarded as subjectively constructed, and grounded in dominant ideologies. It is concluded that scholars typically agree that travel writings shape a stereotypical image of a destination, which helps to maintain a preferred interpretation of the destination and thus reinforce dominant ideologies and power relations. Theory and Method The media texts of the NYT travel section were examined by using critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is the theoretical framework supporting my study but also the methodological framework that provides me with analytical instruments. CDA regards language use as a social practice that is dialectically interrelated with other facets of the social. CDA starts from textual analysis and takes social context as the focal point of analysis, so as to investigate how discursive practices and texts are ideologically shaped by power relations. The application of CDA in my analysis fits well with the critical stance of exploring the ideological underpinning and power relations beneath destination representations. More importantly, as a critical theory, CDA distinguishes itself from other sociolinguistic approaches to language and discourse with an eye on the possibilities for social change, which suits my objective of calling into question how travel journalism can affect tourism s possibilities for intercultural communication. 7

13 My study analyzed the textual representations of Shanghai in the NYT travel section by using CDA, in order to learn the ideological underpinning of its representations and the dialectical relationship of the representations with its broader context. With the assumption that the representations of a tourist destinations are by no means neutral or unbiased considering the inequalities in global circuits of economic and cultural capital (Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005), CDA was adopted to unravel the unfixed power relation between the host society and the society where tourists come from. More importantly, looked at through the lens of CDA, the tourism discourse of Shanghai can be regarded as a component shaping tourism and the social reality of this city. Moreover, adopting CDA and conducting this research with the knowledge and experience of living in Shanghai and observing its transformation, I interpreted and explained the shifting narratives from my standpoint as both a researcher and a local resident. With an understanding about the importance of being reflexive in researching, I started from textual analysis without looking for certain preconceived results. Nonetheless, my particular stance as someone who was involved in the local life of Shanghai unavoidably determined how I interpreted the media text and made conclusions about the changing power relations. Key Findings It was discovered from the textual analysis of the NYT travel writing covering Shanghai that the newspaper increasingly projects the image of Shanghai as a metropolis for diverse consumption, and consequently cultivates a homogenized discourse and routinized ways of viewing Shanghai. Through analyzing the texts and seeking the pattern of destination representations, the key findings from it are as follows: 1) Themes related with consumption and Western lifestyle have become dominant in the discourse. While at the same time, local culture is 8

14 increasingly marginalized; culture and history tend to be backgrounded or commodified as symbols for enhancing consumption; 2) Heavier marketing language that embellishes Shanghai and enhances consumption is used in representations, and the characteristics of the literary genre of travel writings are substituted by those of promotional text; 3) the old discourse of Shanghai as an exotic Chinese city tied up with colonial past and nostalgia is gradually replaced by one that projects its image as an energetic modern city. Through looking into the larger context of the tourism discourse, especially the impact of globalization and capitalist consumer culture, it is concluded that 1) the commercialization tendency of the NYT travel section indicates its closer relationship with the tourism industry; 2) the NYT travel writings have turned to be the product of consensual marketing for achieving reciprocal benefits and reflect the collaborative relationship (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998, p. 5) between the host and guest society. More importantly, through comparing the earlier and more current tourism discourse of Shanghai and integrating the socioeconomic development of China into consideration, the commercialization tendency reflected in the tourism discourse also points to the dynamically changing power relation between China and the USA. By applying CDA in textual analysis of the NYT travel writings, a salient change has emerged that the modernity of Shanghai, which is sought to substitute for exoticism and nostalgia by the local leadership, is likewise actively shaped through the commercialized language promoting consumption in the tourism discourse. Under the premise that tourism discourse reveals dynamically changing power relations, the NYT travel journalism in the social context of globalization has shifted to collaborate with the local economy of Shanghai for achieving mutual benefit. The commercialization tendency of the travel section as seen in the NYT is considered as a critical issue, because of its potential of causing narrowed perception of 9

15 destinations and decreasing the possibilities for intercultural communication, especially when considering that local culture tends to be compromised and marginalized by the search for profitability. However, it is not the intention of this paper to establish the interrelation between tourism discourse and the marginalization of local culture and lifestyle in reality, but rather to raise the attention toward such changes happening in travel sections, and the potential influence on social reality. Exploring tourism discourse from the perspective of seeing it as a constitutive part of social reality, this paper calls for more responsibility of media representations toward destinations. 10

16 Chapter 2 Literature Review In order to critically understand tourism as an active discourse that is affected by social change and changing power relations, literature that lays the foundation for my study was surveyed. Specifically, the review draws from the literature that examines tourism representations concerning its power of shaping and mediating host culture. It is generally taken as the premise by the scholarly accounts that tourism discourse needs to be studied as communicative process that mediates the way in which people view and perceive the world. Furthermore, it is agreed that tourism discourse needs to be studied from a critical stance. A portion of literature specifically studies tourism discourse as a semiotic production of global capitalism. Another major area of literature studies tourism discourse from the perspective of considering it as a site that reveals power relations and ideologies of difference. In this chapter, significant concepts of understanding tourism as a modern leisure activity that has long been associated with othering and the construction of difference are reviewed first. Secondly, tourism and its close relationship with the consumer culture in capitalist society are introduced as well. Moreover, the significance of studying tourism discourse from a critical stance is elaborated, which leads to the intersection of tourism and communication studies and the analysis of tourism as a semiotic system (MacCannell, 2013). Media texts, especially travel journalism in newspapers as a highly representational and influential genre that constructs the other and differences, are discussed. Following that, previous research that focused on the representational power of travel journalism, dominant ideologies and power relations beneath tourism representations are reviewed. This research is the major part of this chapter and informs the concepts and findings that are significant for my own research. Furthermore, studies on the 11

17 representations of Chinese destinations are reviewed so as to provide a sociopolitical context for the case of Shanghai in my own research. Although there has been previous research studying Chinese tourism representations in Western discourse, few of them have written about a particular area such as Shanghai. In addition, few of those previous studies focus on the evolution of tourism discourse over time, as they emphasize more the static image of destinations. In those studies, a large corpus comprised of travel writings is usually under analysis for the purpose of generalizing the destination image or dominant ideologies beneath the image construction. Thus, my research will serve to provide an example of analyzing the tourism discourse of Shanghai from a development perspective so as to enhance the understanding of the evolution happening in tourism discourse. An Introduction to Tourism Theories Tourism, among other social activities, has long been associated with othering and the construction of difference. It is argued by MacCannell (2013) that tourism can be regarded as a ritual performed to the differentiations of society (p. 13), especially by the middle class, which systematically scavenges the earth for new experiences to be woven into a collective, touristic version of other people and other places (p. 13). Likewise, it is argued that the sacredness of tourist experience resides in the contrast between the ordinariness of home and the extraordinariness of away (Dann, 2000, p. 63). Consequently, tourism has become a production line of difference to draw people away from the ordinariness of everyday life (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010). A considerable numbers of previous studies have examined how tourism destinations are portrayed and described as other according to the tourist gaze cast upon distinct culture (Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005, Bhattacharyya, 1997; Chen, 2013; Fürsich, 2002; Shim et al., 2015; Sturma, 1999; Tegelberg, 2010; Wang et al., 2009). 12

18 However, on the other hand, it is also argued by many that with the world becoming ever more globalized and homogenized, leaving home becomes the only way to mark its distinction from other places (MacCannell, 2001). Consequently, the rationale of tourism as experiencing different place of otherness for the purpose of escaping the everyday existence from home is replaced by a kind of simple-minded literalization of social and geographic mobility (MacCannell, 2001, p. 389). According to the viewpoint of MacCannell, the original motive of tourism as being a quest for authenticity is diminished and gradually replaced by the desire for consumption. Also, from the perspective of Cohen (2012), late modem Western tourism tends to become ever more an extension of ordinary leisure activities on a broader spatial scale and on a higher level of consumption (p. 105). With the new middle classes around the world becoming more affluent, they have more disposable income to spend on tourism and are more engaged in the conscious consumption of luxurious tourist facilities and services (Cohen, 2012, p. 104). Modern consumerism being characterized by the quest for products that are new and novel, it is in reality a kind of pleasurable experience called mental hedonism by Colin Campbell (1987). Therefore, travel activities such as vacation and holiday making in tourism are considered as means of consumption that help people achieve their hedonist goals, the craving for something new and different in modern society (Wang, 2004). Furthermore, the culture-ideology of touristic consumption is described as the right to travel (p. 237) by Higgins-Desbiolles (2010), which reflects one's ability to pay in the current system of capitalist globalization (p. 237). And she further argues that: This reveals the psychological and sociological effects of current consumerism, that is the individual 'buys into' consumerist society and asserts their identity no longer through citizenship but through consuming. Thus, for the consuming individual, participating in 13

19 consumerism goes to the heart of personal and social identity; you are literally nobody if you cannot assert your identity and belonging through your consumption practices (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2010, p. 237). Tourism, according to Cohen (2012), became an emblem of the consumer culture and the peak form of consumerism (p. 104). The Significance of Studying Tourism Discourse Critically With tourism establishing itself as the world s largest form of international trade in the age of globalization, it ought to be studied in a more critical stance rather than being overlooked or merely considered as a frivolous, recreational activity (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010, p. 6). Tourism, as advanced by Hollinshead (2007), is more than an everyday management matter of access to sun, sand, and sex, which is the dominant non-critical prescriptivism (p. 169) of tourism studies. According to Hollinshead, it is crucial to be aware that tourism is potentially leading the valuation and revaluation of places and plays a highly powerful role in worldmaking (p. 169), which is introduced to describe the powerful role of tourism in transforming space, place and local culture. Tourism is considered as the medium providing people the commoditized ways of knowing the world, which is not originally provided but culturally constituted (Swain, 2009). From that perspective, Hollinshead (2007) suggests several future research agendas on worldmaking, including studying tourism as a realm of symbolic representation, which is one of the primary resources or capitals of tourism (p. 185), and studying tourism as active discourse. Likewise, tourism that runs central to the global cultural industry (p. 5) is studied from the particular perspective of language and communication by Thurlow and Jaworski (2010) as critical discourse analysts. Tourism discourse is examined as communicative processes [that] 14

20 manifest and reproduce matrices of power and ideologies of difference in the broader context of global capitalism (p. 2). Since advanced capitalist societies have shifted from manufacturingbased to service-based economies, symbolic practices associated with language, communication and imagery are more heavily relied on. Tourism, under such influence, is becoming more discursively mediated (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010, p. 7), as the ultimate product of tourism is the fantasy and experience that is generated by language, the tourism discourse realizing it. In order to satisfy tourists desire for new and different experiences from those in everyday life, tourism discourse becomes a production line of difference (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011), which is constructed through advertising and signs generated by media (Urry, 1990). Similarly, MacCannell (2013) labels tourism a semiotic of capitalist production (p. 20), which is shaped by specific, influential groups in society by utilizing imagery and advertising. According to Urry (1990), tourists are semioticians who constantly look for and consume sights of uniqueness and differences. Furthermore, they read the landscape for signifiers of certain pre-established notions of signs derived from various discourses of travel and tourism (p. 12). As indicated by Thurlow and Jaworski (2010), language is everywhere and sits in the very heart of tourist experience, its representation and its realization, its enculturation and its enactment (p. 10). Besides, it is argued that touristic consumption in the modern culture is driven by signs and media, with leisure time being turned into a routinized and packaged commodity (Watson & Kopachevsky, 1994). In light of postmodernism, the significant influence of media production has changed our relationship to reality and our way of thinking about reality, and it becomes harder to distinguish between the image and the real (Robinson & Dieke, 2011). According to Morgan and Pritchard (1998), tourism images like all other images, are subjectively constructed and reveal the power relations between different cultures. Thus, it is 15

21 important not to take tourism imagery as value-neutral or treat it uncritically as the tourism industry wishes, since it is powerful in worldmaking and reinforcing particular ways of seeing the world (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998). The Significance of Analyzing Media Text in Travel Journalism Accordingly, the importance of media texts, such as newspaper travel writing as a highly representational genre, is emphasized among a wide variety of textual or visual language that comprises the tourism discourse and establishes the reality of tourism and tourist experience (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010). As argued by Fürsich (2002), media workers are routinely placed in indirect contact to a different class, ethnicity or nationality (p. 60). Thus, their primary task is reporting on difference and representing the other as it is their raison d etre of the work (Fürsich, 2002, p. 60). Moreover, mass media, from the perspective of Daye (2005), is the primary source of touristic destination images. In her study examining representations of the Caribbean tourism experience in UK national newspapers, textual analysis of articles appearing in travel sections was conducted. The crucial role of travel journalism was highlighted, and it was concluded that press representations of the Caribbean often lacked distinctiveness in their identity and appeal and tended to promote stylized ways of seeing the region s landscapes (Daye, 2005, p. 14). Travel journalism, however, has tended to be overlooked by scholars because of its lesser importance compared with the hard news of politics and international relations (Cocking, 2009). This situation is also pointed out by Fürsich and Kavoori (2001) that travel journalism hasn t got enough attention by scholars, although it equally constructs representations of others as other journalism genres do. Such a situation can be attributed to travel journalism s inclusion of advertising features and the close relationship with tourism sponsors (Cocking, 2009). The 16

22 entertainment function of travel journalism, which is different from hard news journalism, is discussed by Hanusch (2010). Travel journalism is situated within the lifestyle journalism arena, according to Hanusch, but it also juxtaposes with traditional journalism as it aims to provide impartial advice and practical information for readers. The strong marketing orientation of this particular genre differentiates travel journalism as one that addresses audiences as consumers (Hanusch, 2010). Thus, travel journalism is often neglected because of its lack of critical distance associated with other genres. However, it is important to note the unique situation of travel writings in national press that gives it an appearance of being credible but also the context to influence audiences. Moreover, it is argued that travel journalism is an important site for studying the ideological dimensions of tourism and transcultural encounters, as well as the ongoing dynamics of media globalization (Fürsich & Kavoori, 2001, p. 150). As Cocking (2009) indicates, the growth of the global tourism industry leads to the expansion of travel journalism; thus it requires more attention to study the representational strategy of travel journalism in the commercial environment of lifestyle advertising and individualized consumption (p. 57). Likewise, Fürsich and Kavoori (2001) argue that the booming tourist industry leads to an increasing market for travel advertising and public relations looking for media outlets that promise a targeted and receptive audience (p. 153). With the increasingly closer relationship between advertising and news media, the growth of specialized travel journalism is stimulated, and it became an important resource providing entertainment and daydreaming (Fürsich & Kavoori, 2001). Paralleling such development of travel journalism is the decline of readers interest in hard international news, which is, as pointed out by Fürsich and Kavoori, another factor behind the rise of travel writings as a softer and more entertaining genre of journalism. Thus, the nuanced 17

23 stance of travel journalism in newspapers and the authoritative power assigned to journalists justifies the increasing necessity to study its representation of cultural others. The significance of studying travel journalism is also stressed by Williams and Shaw (1991), as they consider travel writings in newspapers a major resource to inform individuals touristic decisions. Likewise, it is argued by Santos (2004) that the potential of travel writings functioning as provider and decoder of sociocultural information should not be neglected, considering its power of representing and that this genre blurs the margins among fact, fiction and marketing (p. 125). Santos (2004) analyzes travel articles covering Portugal in selected mainstream American newspapers, and he argues that travel writing serves as an outlet for the promotion and construction of destinations and hosts (p. 125). By adopting framing analysis, he concludes that the authors of those articles portray and describe the destination by relying on an established frame of narratives that are shared among popular cultural products. Moreover, readers make sense of the representations through referring to the frames that confirm and legitimize representations (Santos, 2004). Behind the frames of narratives is the shared sociocultural paradigm among readers and writers, American beliefs, priorities and perspectives (p. 135), which are used by travel writers to assume the passive acceptance and consumption of the representations set forth (Santos, 2004, p. 134). Such representations can be problematic, as it is not just cultural description but cultural inscription, which leads audiences to fixate the host culture in a certain way (Chang & Holt, 1991, p. 103). It is also argued by Santos (2004) that travel writings mediate both the perception about a host culture and the sociocultural relationship between the United States and the host country. Therefore, he suggests that more attention should be paid to the representational power of travel writings. 18

24 The Representational Power of Travel Journalism Reinforcing preferred representations of target readers. It is argued by many that travel writing and travel journalism construct the particular image of a destination through the institutional processes involving featured sights selection, information provision and sights interpretation (Bhattacharyya, 1997; Morgan & Pritchard, 1998; Santos, 2004; Duim et al., 2005). Furthermore, these descriptions are essentialized and made appealing to potential tourists (Santos, 2004; Silver, 1993). As argued by Bhattacharyya (1997), these narratives rely on the frames of reference that are provide by and shared among popular cultural products, which confirm and legitimize representations, so that they can be easily understood by readers. According to Morgan and Pritchard (1998), these narratives of tourist experience are highly selective, which reinforce preferred interpretations from the collective cultural knowledge and information (p. 25). Moreover, such representations are often grounded in a structure of opposites such as ancient versus modern, and corrupted versus unadulterated (Santos, 2004, p. 126). According to Santos (2004), misrepresentations are intentionally promoted in the coverage of destinations by travel writers and travel editors for the purpose of constructing a world of the other (p. 126) that can be appealing to target readers. In Travel Journalism: Europe Imagining the Middle East (Cocking, 2009), it is argued that the cultural representations in travel journalism are cyclical and tend to affirm the cultural preconceptions of newspaper s audience. Echoing the statement of Cocking, Spurr (1993) indicates that the travel journalist is always on the lookout for scenes that carry an already established interest for Western audiences, thus investing perception itself with the mediating power of cultural difference (p. 21). Furthermore, in Spurr s (1993) The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, the Western colonialist discourses 19

25 representing non-western cultures and peoples in travel writings from different historical periods are examined, and strong evidence of representational continuities over space and time is offered. In the paper studying the ways in which travel journalism represents the Middle East in British broadsheets, Cocking (2009) explores how the older, established discourse interacts with and is employed by travel journalism in the modern social context of commercialization and individualized consumption. It is concluded that travel journalism is considerably more far reaching and varied in remit with the emphasis more on evoking the past (Cocking, 2009, p. 57). Travel journalism s endeavor of presenting the cultural heritage of destination and its representational strategy of authenticity is emphasized in the study. Cocking concludes that the Middle East is often positioned as pre-modern, exotic and other, which has its origin in nineteenth-century European travel writing on the Middle East. Although the contemporary travel writings are removed from their original context, Cocking argues that the deployment of older discourse serves both the cultural and commercial imperatives of contemporary European travel journalism, and the representational consistency enables European collective imagination of the Middle East. It is argued that international tourism representations highlight certain aspects of destinations and hence essentialize host societies and cultures, so as to cater to tourists quest for authenticity (Chen, 2013). Another medium that embodies such a characteristic is the tourist guidebook, which, according to Tim Hannigan (2013), is under the overall category of travel literature, and is the least journalistic branch of travel writing. Omitting differing politicaleconomic, religious, ritualistic elements (Tegelberg, 2010, p. 494) and relying upon the reproduction of favorable themes, guidebooks are therefore considered as a promotional text of a destination culture. However, with the line between travel journalism and the promotional text of 20

26 the tourist guidebook being blurred, guidebooks function of mediating foreign destinations to readers is worth consideration for studying tourism discourse (Bhattacharyya, 1997; Tegelberg, 2010). It is argued that guidebooks like Lonely Planet produce tourist themes that are familiar and appealing to readers, which simultaneously contribute to their social awareness of destinations (Tegelberg, 2010). Applying semiotic analysis of the Lonely Planet India, Bhattacharyya (1997) also concludes that guidebooks primarily reinforce certain images of the destination, such as India, by glorifying its past and exoticizing its present, which consequently mediates tourists experience and a certain relationship with the local inhabitants. With readers prior familiarity with the tourism discourse being reflected in the guidebook, the meanings communicated through signs can be comprehensible and made appealing to readers (Bhattacharyya, 1997). Power relations, ideologies and tourism representations. As pointed out earlier in this chapter, tourism representations are regarded as subjectively constructed and are by no means neutral or unbiased considering the inequalities in global circuits of economic and cultural capital (Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005, p. 1017). According to Morgan and Pritchard (1998), it is the powerful and the enfranchised who shape the ideological arena and it is important to examine how touristic images of particular places and peoples contribute to how such places and people are portrayed and perceived globally (p. 5). Being grounded in the dominant ideology, tourism representations are affected by political, social, economic and institutional practices and realities (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998, p. 17). In order to explore and answer what the major intercultural communication themes highlighted in American travel writings are, and how they reinforce certain ideologies, Santos (2006) analyzed the best-selling series The Best American Travel Writing. It is suggested that 21

27 these themes in travel writings generate and promote images and paradigms that characterize Americans relationship to and expectations of the Other (Santos, 2006, p. 625). In his analysis of one article recounting travel experience in China, it is discovered that the charming poverty is amplified to satisfy Americans imagination toward the remote China. More importantly, such representations detach the nation s present from its past, which allows for a lack of acknowledgment of the host s sociocultural, political, and economic intricacies (Santos, 2006, p. 632). Moreover, it is discovered that host countries are assigned to a peripheral role, and the issues of their development are focused on in those best American travel writings (Santos, 2006). As Santos argues, these travel writings help readers make sense of the world and avoid other ways of knowing the world that might lead US ideology to be questioned, so that the American social order can be kept intact (Santos, 2006). Likewise, it is argued that with modern capitalism producing and reproducing images that obscure problems and contradictions in tourism discourse, dominant ideologies that legitimize and naturalize social structure are enhanced (Watson & Kopachevsky, 1994). On the other hand, another layer of the preferred representation, which is called the complicity with the tourist industry (Daye, 2005, p. 15) is discussed. In the study examining representations of the Caribbean tourism experience in UK national newspapers, it is found that the close relationship of travel journalism with tourism industry is overtly indicated by the specific information on holiday package prices, and contact information of tour operators and airlines (Daye, 2005). Besides that, the universal use of the first person, active voice in travel articles also contributes to the mediation of destination. Similar to the viewpoint of seeing travel writings as complicit with the industry, Morgan and Pritchard (1998) argue that tourism images and representations could be regarded as products of a consensual marketing (p. 5), which is 22

28 often a collaborative relationship established because of economic reasons. However, it is still necessary to acknowledge the unequal power relation and that it is the powerful and the enfranchised who shape the ideological arena (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998, p. 5). More importantly, as pointed out by Morgan and Pritchard, the constructions of destination images reveal the dynamic relationships between peoples, cultures, genders and states. Thus, these studies lay the foundation for informing the complexity of tourism representations and add to the understanding of the dynamic and unequal power relations between host and guest countries that are reflected in tourism discourse. Homogenization and stereotyping in travel writings. Besides the potential of sustaining the unequal relationship between host and guest countries in representations, these travel writings are considered as problematic because of the potential of serving as an instrument of homogenization and stereotyping, leading to generalizations that bring into question tourism s possibilities for intercultural communication (Santos, 2006, p. 637). According to MacCannell (2001), with destination images being increasingly affected by the interrelation between the tourism industry and travel journalism, places along with their culture and history are now packaged for being sold to potential tourists: The earlier displaced symbols have the dignity of marking actual historical events, however egregious that history might have been. However, their contemporary relatives mark nothing but the power of global capital to efface history and to construct generic localities, or to package identity. (p. 385) From the perspective of critical cultural studies, tourism in the capitalist system has transformed culture into an industry, one which churns out cultural products characterized by 23

29 predictability and homogeneity and designed to support social conformity and control (Shepherd, 2002, p. 193). It is also suggested by Fürsich and Kavoori (2001) that the narratives in travel journalism tend to package remote places and cultures, which results in the global identity crisis (p. 163) at a time of globalization. Therefore, it is significant to research and answer the questions of how the image of the other is collectively shaped in discourse by different agencies that have the power of representing, and at what level all these representations are connected to construct the reality of tourism and tourism experience (Fürsich & Kavoori, 2001) Representations of Asian Destinations and China One of the widely studied regions among tourist destinations in Western scholarship is developing countries in Asia. Travel writings written about Asian destinations tend to direct the tourist s gaze towards historical buildings or romanticize ancient landscapes through a social imaginary lens (Wang et al., 2009, p. 131). The past in those writings is rhetorically constructed to be timeless and unchanging, and is portrayed as surrounded by atmospheric themes of opulence, mysticism, and strangeness (Echtner & Prasad, 2003, p. 669). More importantly, it is argued that in order to comply with the colonial ideology held by readers from developed Western countries, the developing Asian destinations are portrayed as the other, which is opposite to the Western images as the embodiment of modernity, maturity, and rationality (Echtner & Prasad, 2003). According to Shim and Santos (2015), Asian countries are still perceived as unfathomable and far removed from the realm of most Americans daily lives (p. 177), which is one of the reasons why Asian destinations are perpetuated as exotic and mysterious by the tourism industry for the purpose of stimulating Western tourists curiosity (Echtner & Prasad, 2003). For instance, in Western tourism discourse of third world destinations 24

30 such as Cambodia and India, their past glories are featured and amplified as the most worthy of the tourist s gaze (Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005; Norindr, 2006; Tegelberg, 2010). In addition to that, Sturma s (1999) representational loop (p. 714), which stands for the reiteration of stereotypical images through narrative, fictions, art and films, reinforces the preferred representations and turns them into a part of the language of tourism. In the study on the representation of Cambodia as destination in global media, it is found that the constructed iconic image of the destination is reproduced and circulated in literary texts, ethnographic accounts, travel narratives and journalistic reports, which bestows the constructed image with the quality of being real (Norindr, 2006, p. 56). Furthermore, Siegel (2002) points out that the West is enabled to assert power over the Orient through the rhetorical strategy of favoring history and tradition over the Orient s rightful claim on modern development. According to Spurr (1993) in the analysis of Western colonialist discourses in travel journalism, one of the prominent rhetoric modes is called surveillance, which is used to describe the authoritative observation of Western writers to provide knowledge about non-western cultures and peoples. As pointed out by Spurr (1993), the journalist s gaze marks a privilege and power of looking, examining and representing, which also excludes the journalists from the human reality constituted as the object of observation (p. 13). By actively providing knowledge about Oriental landscapes and peoples and reiterating the images in travel journalism, these representations serve to maintain and reinforce colonial discourse and the power relations and ideology it fosters (Echtner & Prasad, 2003, p. 672). As Galasinski and Jaworski (2003) argue, what underpins the preferred representations is the inequality of power relation between the communities of the observer/representer and the observed/represented. How tourists see a destination and its inhabitants is structured by dominant ideologies that are 25

31 communicated through tourism discourses, the sites of constant power struggle where hegemonic ideas of superiority and inferiority are continuously played out (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998, p. 15). In the study of American newspaper writing about China (Wang et al., 2009), the colonial ideological underpinnings for the tourism representations are also highlighted. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis to travel writings, Wang et al. (2009) discovered three major themes in the representations of China as a popular Asian tourism destination: negated development, romanticized tradition, and vilified ideology. In their study, the landscape and Chinese traditions are regarded as impressive on one hand, while on the other, the depiction is also juxtaposed with local realities of poverty, underdevelopment, and danger (Wang et al., 2009, p. 131). Likewise, Xiao and Mair (2006) also conclude that cultural heritage in China is the primary focus of Western tourists gaze, and is often associated with descriptors like durable, mysterious, exotic, and splendid. Moreover, local inhabitants are characterized by their endurance and exotic simplicity (Xiao & Mair, 2006, p. 10). Echoing the study result, Wang et al. (2009) also suggest that the dominant ideology within the Oriental past theme operated within frames in which a romantic historicity was rhetorically constructed (p. 131). More importantly, a paradox of image of China in travel writings is identified in both studies, which is embedded with narratives denigrating Chinese sociopolitical ideology. As indicated more specifically by Xiao and Mair (2006): The dark images of China were largely derived from a binary perception of the travel writers with regard to the extent or scale of the continua between democracy/human rights versus communism/dictatorship, the developed/industrialized versus the 26

32 underdeveloped/undeveloped, the modern versus the ancient, safety/stability versus threat/instability, and even the advanced versus the primitive. (p. 11) In the study, American Media Representations of China s Modernity, it is concluded that in critiquing the modern development and thus, remaining within the realm of dominant ideologies, the narratives went so far as to describe the changes in China as destructive endeavors (Wang et al., 2009, p. 130). The modernization processes of many Chinese cities in the narratives of newspapers travel sections that are under the analysis are deemed as disruptive to local landscape and old neighborhoods (Wang et al., 2009). Furthermore, the local landscape is looked at by the travel writers from the safe and superior vantage of him, which is the norm of being a Western, white, bourgeois and heterosexual man (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998, p. 15). As argued by Wang et al., such narratives denote an authority of the author over the landscape, as the authors freely make authoritative judgments on the aesthetic taste and modernization achievement of Chinese cities. Interestingly enough, however, not all destination representations are interwoven with such ideological contradictions. Many argue that the elite history and art of some Asian destinations like India and Cambodia is glorified and highlighted while their current controversial issues are strategically avoided in travel writings (Britton, 1979; Silver, 1993). Additionally, African tourism writing is also problematically bound up with narratives of primitive culture, while the inhabitants combat in civil war and striving for economic development is excluded from the tourism discourse (Bruner, 1991). In the representations of Portugal in travel writings, a safe and sanitized social reality is shown through the neutral writing style (Santos, 2004). In the case of travel writings about China, although the country s economic development is widely addressed, criticism towards the unrestrained development in contrast 27

33 with rapid loss of traditional culture and natural landscape is prevalent on the other hand (Wang et al., 2009). Thus, it is revealed that tourism representations are affected by dominant ideology, sociopolitical context and the power relation between host and guest countries, which points to the potential of further exploration. Conclusion Tourism discourse has been affirmed to be a place where tourist destinations are constantly invented, reinvented, produced and reproduced (Duim et al., 2005). And the representations reflect the Western ideology about how the Asian world should be looked at. Thus, the inclusion and exclusion of themes and the narratives about the other in Western tourism discourse is inevitably interwoven with larger sociopolitical context and broader discourse, whether intentionally or unconsciously related by the writer. More importantly, tourism discourse constantly undergoes variation along with the unfixed power relation between the societies that the host and guest come from. Thus, the selection and representation of the Other, which accords with the Western ideology, can offer a glimpse of such change in power relation. With previous research being conducted upon destination representations in Western discourse through critical analysis, this research builds on the work of scholars who have identified the importance of tourism discourse in the shaping of host culture. Studying the particular case of Shanghai by using CDA can provide insight about the representational power and the construction of host culture in tourism discourse. More importantly, addressing this question from development perspective can add to the understanding of the evolution of tourism discourse, which is under the influence of changing social reality and power relations. 28

34 Chapter 3 Theory & Method This chapter focuses on the theoretical and methodological lens that was applied to the study of tourism discourse of Shanghai in travel journalism. The key concepts of critical discourse analysis (CDA) are presented specifically in the following sections. The reasons for using CDA approach as the overall framework in the study are elaborated so as to justify the choice of applying it as well. Starting from textual analysis and taking social context as the focal point of analysis, CDA regards language use as a social practice that is dialectically interrelated with other facets of the social. The application of CDA in my analysis fits well with the critical stance of exploring the ideological underpinning and power relations beneath destination representations. As a critical theory, CDA distinguishes itself with an eye on the possibilities for social change, which suits my objective of calling into question how travel journalism can affect tourism s possibilities for intercultural communication. An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) Norman Fairclough is the most prominent figure who developed the method known as Critical Discourse Analysis. CDA provides theoretical approaches to study the relations between discourse and social and cultural developments in different social domains (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 60). Originated from Critical Linguistics, CDA regards language use as a social practice, which implies that language is dialectically interrelated with other facets of the social, and it is socially constituted, but also socially constitutive (Fairclough, 2000, p. 309). According to Fairclough, discursive practices are distinct from other dimensions of social practice, and the discursive dimension together with other dimensions of social practice constitutes our social world (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002). One of the most important concepts of Fairclough s critical approach to discourse is orders of discourse, and it highlights that a single 29

35 type of discourse of a social institution or social domain is constituted by various discursive types that are used (Fairclough, 2000). Moreover, discourses are undergoing transformation through contact with other discourses, and are engaged in a constant discursive struggle with one another to achieve hegemony (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 7). As indicated by Wodak and Meyer (2001), unequal power relations among different social domains leads to discursive differences and transformation, which can be traced in texts as sites of discursive struggles. CDA takes the context of language use as a focal point of analysis, and takes particular interest in the relation between language and power (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 2). As summarized by Fairclough (1995), CDA is aiming: To systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power. (p ) This description points to the critical stance of CDA as a theory through the revelation of struggle that resides in the unequal power relations of the social world. Aiming to decipher ideology by demystifying discourse, CDA as a theory of language incorporates power as a major premise to understand the use of language and discourse (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 11). As indicated by Wodak and Meyer (2001), discourse is considered to have the ideological effects of producing and reproducing unequal power relations. It is suggested by Fairclough (2000) that those who are involved in various discursive practices are normally unaware of the ideological assumptions and power relations underlying their practices. And such opacity (Fairclough, 2000, p. 309) as he calls it helps sustain these power relations. Paying particular attention to 30

36 unequal power relations that are established and maintained by ideology, CDA distinguishes itself from earlier sociolinguistic approaches to language and discourse with an eye on the possibilities for social change (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 2). Along with other critical theories embracing the same goal of rooting out a particular kind of delusion, CDA seeks to create awareness in agents of how they are deceived about their own needs and interests (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 10). Discourse Mediating Social Reality The term discourse is defined as a particular way of talking about and understanding the world or an aspect of the world (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 1). Discourse, in the definition of Locke (2004), is sense-making story - a coherent way of making sense of the world or some aspect of it as reflected in human sign systems (p. 5). More importantly, it is significant to understand discourse as a process beyond static text, which means that discourse is an on-going work in progress, a continuous process of semantic choice, a movement through the network of meaning potential, with each set of choices constituting the environment for a further set (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, p. 10). This argument further indicates the inseparable connection of discourse with its social context. It is stated by Foucault that reality is always a social construction under the force of discourse (Devereux, 2007). Knowledge is understood as various kinds of contents which make up a consciousness and/or all kinds of meanings used by respective historical persons to interpret and shape the surrounding reality (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 33). It is now widely agreed on by contemporary discourse analytical approaches that truth is, to a large extent, created discursively (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002). Furthermore, the claim that our access to reality is always through language (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 8) is taken as the starting point of understanding the 31

37 social world. With the awareness that language precedes and shapes reality rather than is passively shaped by reality, language has now become the heart of scholarly investigation by applying CDA (Locke, 2004). While by claiming this, it doesn t mean that reality doesn t exist. As suggested by Wodak and Meyer (2001), discourses live a life of their own in relation to reality (p. 36) - discourses are not passive information provided by reality, nor should they be considered as the mere reflection of reality. It is crucial to understand that discourses are valid material realities among others as a significant part of the world, which determines and forms reality as well (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). Discourses can reflect reality, as it is a channel through which information about underlying mental states and behavior or facts about the world are communicated (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 9). On the other hand, changes in discursive level lead to social changes, as language use simultaneously shapes social identities, social relations and systems of knowledge and belief, which are all indispensable functioning elements in the construction of society and culture (Fairclough, 2000). Thus CDA is not about analyzing the real meanings of texts or whether textual representation is right or wrong (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002). The primary focus of it is rather to explore the dialectic relationship between the two sides of language use, socially constituted and socially constitutive through discursive patterns (Fairclough, 2000). In contrast to other branches of discourse analysis, CDA considers discourse just as one aspect rather than the whole of a social practice; discursive practice interacts with the other dimensions of a social practice and makes its contribution to shaping society and culture (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002). In the sense of CDA, the analysis of discourse is not only about interpretation, but about the production of reality which is performed by discourse (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 36). 32

38 Orders of Discourse and Intertextuality One of the important concepts raised by Fairclough is orders of discourse, which means the configuration of all the discourse types which are used within a social institution or a social field (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 67). Fairclough (2001) indicates that various discourses and genres are within this constitution of discourse type, and he provides an explanation as follows: It is the way in which diverse genres and discourses and styles are networked together. An order of discourse is a social structuring of semiotic difference - a particular social ordering of relationships amongst different ways of making meaning, i.e. different discourse and genres and styles. (para. 6) This points to the significant understanding that no discourse is a closed entity (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 6), and discourse is constantly experiencing changes through its interaction with other discourses. Different discursive types beyond just one single discourse contribute to this on-going discursive constitution and transformation (Fairclough, 2000). Discourses are used by people as the resources for creating new constellations of words and sentences, which can be regarded as new hybrid discourses (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 17). Furthermore, the order of discourse is reproduced and changed through creative language use, which can be importing discourses and genres from other orders of discourse (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002). And in this process of changing and reproducing, the boundaries and relationships within the order of discourse are being negotiated and reproduced as well (Fairclough, 2000). Thus, there emerges a discursive mass where various discourses are intertwined or entangled with one another like vines or strands (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 35). Additionally, Fairclough (2001) indicates that there are dominant, marginal, opposite or 33

39 alternative ways of making meaning in a particular order of discourse, which are involved in the struggle for achieving hegemony. Hegemony, in the sense of discourse, means fixing the meanings of language in their own way (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 7). Hence, it becomes the goal of CDA to untangle the discursive mass and discover how the dominant discourse is constructed and maintained. In order to achieve the goal as mentioned above, intertextual analysis is introduced to unravel the articulated genres and discourse reflected through texts (Fairclough, 2000). The concept of intertextuality is raised by Fairclough to investigate how an individual text draws on elements and discourses of other texts (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 7) so as to reproduce a discourse. Having said that, it is worth noticing that text analysis is not enough for discourse analysis, although CDA is a text-oriented approach to analyze social reality (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002,). In comparison with linguistic analysis, which is descriptive in nature, Fairclough (2000) indicates that intertextual analysis is more interpretive, and the sort of interpretation is about locating a text in its relation to the order of discourse. In addition to that, Fairclough (2000) indicates that there are both external and internal relations between orders of discourse, and both of them include choice relations and chain relations (p. 317). Referring to the process of choosing and appropriating within media and from other adjacent orders of discourse, the two concepts are used in intertextual analysis upon the complex process of text production (Fairclough, 2000). As described by Fairclough (2000), CDA aims to analyze three dimensions of language use as a communicative event (p. 311), which are the dimension of text, the dimension of discursive practice and the dimension of social practice. Furthermore, the relationship between texts and social practice is mediated by discursive practice, which points to the processes of text 34

40 production and text consumption (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 68). Media texts are Conditions of production and interpretation Process of production and interpretation 3 Text Description (text analysis) Interpretation (processing analysis) 1 2 Discourse practice Sociocultural practice (Situational; Institutional; Societal ) Explanation (social analysis) Figure 2. Fairclough s dimensions of discourse and discourse analysis. (Locke, 2004, p. 42) considered to be the sensitive barometers of cultural change which manifest in their heterogenity and contradictoriness the often tentative, unfinished and messy nature of change (Fairclough, 2000, p. 314). Thus, heterogeneous texts are taken as the centre of analysis to uncover how discursive practices mediate between texts and social practices (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002). CDA as Interdisciplinary Approaches A significant assumption of CDA is that discourse as an on-going sociocultural practice is always situated in time and space (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). The linguistic textual analysis of language use in the sense of CDA can never be separated from its social interaction. As stated by Fairclough (2000), discourse analysis may involve its more immediate situational context, the wider context of institutional practices the event is embedded within, or the yet wider frame of the society and the culture (p. 315). According to Wodak & Meyer (2001), context in their 35

41 discourse-historical approach is the historical sources and the background of the social and political fields in which discursive events are embedded (p. 65). Other scholars define context with some differences. Halliday termed context of culture, which is related to the broader institutional and cultural environment (Locke, 2004, p. 19). Furthermore, Hasan created the term contextual configuration (Locke, 2004, p. 19) to indicate that different genres of text - for instance, interview and resume - can make sense of a text s structure. With the focus on specific communicative events on the one hand, the order of discourse, which is always evolving with the context of social and cultural changes, should be emphasized by analyst at the same time (Fairclough, 2000). What is presented above implies the critical feature of CDA as being interdisciplinary and open to the broadest range of factors that exert an influence on texts (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 15). CDA encompasses three traditions of analysis, which are interpretative tradition, macro-sociological tradition, and micro-sociological tradition, and tries to unite the three traditions in different levels of analysis (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002). Different from other sociolinguistic methods, CDA takes the idea of mediation and tries to avoid postulating a simply deterministic relation between text and the social (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 3), but rather taking text as a starting point for getting a better understanding. Applications of CDA in Previous Research It is stressed by Wodak and Meyer (2001) that CDA cannot be understood as one single method. The ways of translating the theoretical claims into instruments and methods of analysis (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 18) vary, depending on the different emphasis of studies. Moreover, there is no typical way of collecting data in CDA (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). Nonetheless, it is commonly accepted that linguistic categories play a crucial role in CDA, and it 36

42 is pointed out that the core operationalizations depend on linguistic concepts such as actors, mode, time, tense, argumentation, and so on (Wodak &Meyer, 2001, p. 25). This section provides some examples for different practical approaches of CDA, which can help shed light upon the actual implementation of the theoretical framework. In the study about how US-based Chinese diasporic media mediates between immigrants and centres of powers in mainstream society of the United States, Sheng (2014, p. 41) employs the analytical paradigm of CDA and follows the three dimensional model of Fairclough. In the first stage, the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) methodologies are applied to the textual analysis of selected news reports by examining the patterns of language use. Based on the same news event of Obama hosting a naturalization ceremony, Sheng analyzes the news reports from USA Today and the diasporic media World Journal, and specifically compares their lexical choices and modality in describing the event. In the second stage of exploring the relationship between text and discursive practice, intertextual analysis is conducted by investigating how the news sources are presented in the news texts through direct and indirect speech. In the final stage, wider social background are taken into study. Moreover, the author overviews the backgrounds of Chinese diasporic media in US society, and takes into consideration the effects of the social position of USA Today and World Journal, which helps understand how the contrasting representations are caused by contextual differences between the two media. Acknowledging the limitations in capturing the whole picture of the issue by using two most typical texts, Sheng (2014) justifies the adequacy of samples by stressing his aims of probing the meaning and paving foundation for more conclusive findings about the role of Chinese diasporic media (p. 46). Having a sense of interconnectedness of the three analytical levels in mind, the author applies CDA to uncover different ideologies embedded in different language 37

43 uses and to make clear the relationship of language, power, and ideology (Sheng, 2014, p. 46). The social positions of both news media along with their agenda and discourse frameworks emphasizing different social interests are scrutinized, through which their respective value judgments are revealed. In the study American Media Representations of China s Traditions and Modernity of Wang et al. (2009), the three dimensional model of Fairclough is applied to the analysis of newspaper representations of Chinese touristic destinations, so as to reveal how the dynamic power relations and conflicting political ideologies impact tourism discourse. Aiming at getting a more generalized answer of the question of how American media represent Chinese destinations, a total of 60 travel articles published in six major American newspapers were analyzed through CDA approach. Several steps are carried out according to each analytical level of CDA. In the textual dimension, the patterns of narratives are examined and the representational structure is identified for systematical interpretation. In the discursive practice dimension, the fact that some specific meanings are favored and some are neglected in representations is studied. Wang et al. (2009) found that the ways of representing Chinese destinations can be generalized and categorized as three major themes. In the social practice dimension, the authors relate the different themes of representations with the the macro-structural context within which the discourse is embedded (Wang et al., 2009, p. 129), from which the ideological struggle exists between Western capitalism and China s communist ideology is demonstrated. The three dimensional model of Fairclough is well recognized as the ideal framework for studying representations of culture and places. Although many of these studies are structured according to the analytical levels of text, discursive practice and social practice, the actual approaches to each of the three dimensions vary. In a paper that examines how protected areas in 38

44 Greece are discursively constructed as tourism destinations, the ways of travel text negotiating tourism with environmentalism are taken into analysis (Stamou & Paraskevopoulos, 2006). The order of discourse (Fairclough, 2000, p. 310) under analysis, in this case, is the incorporation of touristic discourse or more broadly, economic discourse with environmentalist discourse. Following specific coding rules in content analysis, the study codes the textual data according to relevant subjects and discourse categories. Furthermore, quantitative methods are also adopted to measure the number of papers and number of words of different discourse types, so as to compare the presence and dominance of them. In qualitative level of analysis, close reading is applied to different categories of discourse. For example, the authors specifically examine how environmentalist depictions draw on various categories of information, from biology, zoology to botany, and their depiction patterns as well, so as to see how the protected areas are represented in this type of travel text. Although it is impossible to provide an exhaustive review of studies dealing with critical analysis of textual and visual representations, this section identifies the value of CDA in unfolding social reality, which is constructed through discourse, or specifically tourism discourse in my case, according to dominant ideologies. Despite the variations in practical application, the significance of dialectical relationship between the three analytical levels stands out, which also points me to a sound approach of organizing my own research. As a critical method aiming to investigate social equality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, legitimized and so on by language use (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 2), CDA provides both conceptual framework and practical toolbox. All three studies that are mentioned above start with a shared premise that media text is a sociocultural production and is embedded with ideologies, which reflects the central idea of CDA approach to social reality. Additionally, the three studies also shed light 39

45 upon what kinds of research questions can be asked by using this method. Moreover, the previous studies also lend insights about how CDA can be used to decode meaning that is represented in discourse, and systematically interpret the complex representational structure of discourse. With the focus of studies being different, the three articles also provide me with more specific ideas about the process of sampling. In order to get a more generalized sketch of the discourse, a larger corpus is necessary for analysis. While with the objective of acquiring local meanings, a closer and detail-oriented analysis needs to be conducted. For instance, the study (Sheng, 2014) about mediating influence of Chinese diasporic media in the U.S. looks into the location of the news event in both newspapers, the exact layout of the pages, and how photos are presented along with their captions. Furthermore, the detailed lexical choices of both texts, from verb to modifier, that deliver different meanings and modalities are examined. However, with the contents of 84 issues of weekly travel magazine, the study about the representations of Greece as touristic destination focuses more on intertextual level of analysis. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this study gives a sketch of the situation of eco-tourism discourse about traveling in Greece. Last but not least, all three studies emphasize the interconnection of the three analytical levels, and demonstrate the ways of answering research questions by integrating the three aspects together. Rationale for Choosing CDA My study analyzed the textual representations of Shanghai in the travel section of mainstream Western news media, in order to learn about how the cultural other is constructed and what is the ideological underpinning of the representations. As discovered by previous studies, tourism discourse is a site where tourist destinations are constantly invented, reinvented, produced and reproduced (Duim, Peters, & Wearing, 2005). Furthermore, the representations of 40

46 tourist destinations are by no means neutral or unbiased considering the inequalities in global circuits of economic and cultural capital (Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005, p. 1017). Besides that, broader historic and political relations between different societies also lead the representations to be more complex (Wang et al., 2009). More importantly, the construction of tourism discourse is mediated by the unfixed power relation between the host society and the societies where tourists come from. Thus, the basic assumption of this study is that Western tourism discourse of Shanghai deviates from local s perspectives, and is constructed through the reflection of Western ideologies and is influenced by broader social factors. The Western tourism discourse of Shanghai, if looked through the lens of CDA, can be regarded as a part of the synergy shaping the reality of this city. The social reality of Shanghai gains its meanings through various discourses, and the tourism discourse being one of them ascribes meanings to the culture and events that have happened there through the language of tourism. Travel writings of a destination, which can be viewed as a type of discursive practice, is always in a dialectical relationship with their broader context. As one dimension of social practice, travel writing is in a dialectical relationship with the other moments of a social practice (Jørgenson & Phillips, 2002, p. 19). To be more specific, travel writing mediates the relationship between the textual representations of the city and broader social practices, for instance, the social practices of sightseeing, travel planning and other discursive practices of referring to the city. Adopting the stance of CDA, I want to take the travel writings of Shanghai in US travel journalism as snapshots of different historical moments, which are dialectically related with larger context and other dimensions or moments of social practices. From discovering the intertextuality of the tourism discourse and the ways the discursive practice of 41

47 travel writing evolves, new light might be shed upon the social construction of the reality of Shanghai and how the city is widely viewed. In addition, CDA provides ideal analytical tools in practical research, which well fit my research questions. As indicated by Fairclough (2000), there is intersection of two significant perspectives within critical discourse analysis, which are the analysis of a normative use of discourse types (genres and discourses) and a creative mixture of them (p. 313). In this sense, travel writing as a distinctive discourse type, provides heterogeneous text that reflects the complex and creative mixture of genres and discourses. Furthermore, travel writing as a discursive practice, may also become conventionalized (Fairclough, 2000, p. 314). By using CDA, the construction of the cultural otherness of Shanghai can be manifested through untangling the tentative, unfinished and messy media text (Fairclough, 2000, p. 314). More importantly, ideology embedded in the dominant discourse can be revealed and examined though intertextual analysis of CDA. In terms of the methods of doing discourse analysis, Potter and Wetherell (1987) described and provided eight steps as a guideline for researchers. First of all,the researcher needs to decide on the research question. Following that, sample data needs to be selected, which is an essential step of the research, since the sample data should derive from and align with the research objective set by the researcher. For the next step, Potter and Wetherell suggested that various forms of accurate records should be collected for the research. They also suggested doing interviews, transcribing and coding the interviews for analysis. It is worth noticing that coding should be carried out for the goal of discovering interesting findings from the material. Instead of coding the material for the sake of quantitative analysis, it is significant to be aware that coding in discourse analysis is always for qualitative results. As for the step of analyzing, Potter and 42

48 Wetherell indicated that there is no hard rule for doing discourse analysis. The purpose is to identify patterns of consistency and variation of discourse (Potter and Wetherell, 1987, p 169). Before writing up the arguments and interpretation from the discourse analysis, it is suggested that researcher needs to validate the discourse that is identified through the analysis and look for anything that might be missed out, unexplained or overlooked. Rationale for Choosing the NYT Travel Writings In order to study how travel journalism constructs the tourism discourse of Shanghai, travel writings from the New York Times were selected for this research. Newspaper travel writing is chosen for this study because of this particular communication practice itself. Although the influence of the traditional media is waning, mainstream newspaper is still considered as an authoritative media outlet, and journalists are assigned with cultural and interpretive authoritative power (Santos, 2004, p. 134). Moreover, newspaper travel sections are actually flourishing, as they produce soft news and get advertisement support from the tourism industry (Hanusch, 2010). Even though these articles are often juxtaposed with commercial tourism advertisements and promotions and share their concerns and perspectives (Daye, 2005, p. 15), they still appear independent to the audience. Under the umbrella of the newspaper it subordinates to, the travel section disguises itself as a provider of sociocultural information (Santos, 2004, p. 125). Thus, the communication practice of newspaper travel writing is particularly interesting and significant to be studied, since it constructs and represents the image of a tourist destination while at the same time blurring the margins among fact, fiction and marketing (Santos, 2004, p. 125). Having said that, on the other hand, newspaper travel writing as cultural producer is still bounded by institutional rules and paradigms, and the dominant ideologies the newspaper 43

49 represents (Santos, 2004). Newspaper travel writing as a different media outlet, for example, from movies, magazines or TV programs, is chosen for this study not merely because of its dissemination and consumption, but rather its particular standpoint and ideology in representation. Different from other media outlets like travel guidebooks or travel magazines, the newspaper travel section mediates the image of destinations and influences its audience with less overt intention of advertising and selling tourist destination. As stated by Hanusch (2010), a newspaper travel article is neither as independent or neutral as news reports can be, nor can it be classed as purely commercial (p. 70) - which reflects a complex mixture of genres and discourses (Fairclough, 2000). Along with other types of media, the newspaper travel section provides a specific way of viewing the world and other people. In my research, internet data from the NYT s online website was collected for analysis because of its easy accessibility to both audience and researchers, and its wider dissemination as well. The New York Times was selected because it is a US newspaper of wide influence. The USA s status of being a sole Western superpower and the primary Western representor of China renders it the rampant influence of its culture and ideology in the world (Chen, 2013, p. 60). More specifically, the website of the NYT is the most popular American newspaper website and the third most popular news website in the world according to the online traffic ranking result from Alexa.com (searched on April 7 th, 2016). More importantly, regarded as a national newspaper of record (Brossard, Shanahan & McComas, 2004, p. 360), the NYT is one of the premier agenda-setting newspapers in the United States, and it makes use of the international travel writers on a regular basis, whose articles can be seen in a variety of newspapers and magazines (Santos, 2004). Presumably, the agenda setting effect of the NYT spreads to its travel writings, and the representation of tourist destinations is, in some level, taken as truth because 44

50 of the authority it has long been socially assigned (Santos, 2004). Nonetheless, it worth mentioning that the focus of this thesis is not measuring its effect of representation and agenda setting, but unraveling the ideologies that underpin newspaper travel writing. As has been presented in the literature review, media representations of tourist destinations in Western tourism discourse reflect Western ideology, and are inevitably interwoven with the larger sociopolitical context and broader discourse (Bruner, 1991). Thus, it will be at the centre of this thesis to discover the ideological underpinnings of the travel articles in the NYT, and how the particular communication practice of travel writing mediates tourism and the social reality of Shanghai. Data Collection and Corpus Design Having decided on the data source for my analysis, I moved on to collect articles from the NYT. The data collecting process was straightforward, as there is a travel section at the top of the front page on its website, and the articles are sorted according to the region that destinations belong to. All the Shanghai coverage is under the category of China in the section of Asia. Following content criteria, 30 articles from all the retrievable articles were selected into the analysis corpus, which were released during the time period ranging from March, 1984 to November, And 26 out of 30 of them are indicated as having appeared in print, which ensures the wide dissemination and influence of these articles. Besides, most of the authors of the 30 articles were identified as Westerners based on their names and online profile. Their nationalities, however, couldn t be identified due to the lack of relevant information, except that four of them are Chinese-American. The criteria for selecting the articles are described as follows. 45

51 First of all, the article should be exclusively about Shanghai, either providing information for planning a trip or a more specific topic which is of interest to general readers or potential visitors to Shanghai. None of the articles chosen for detailed textual analysis should reveal an overt advertising intention, so as to make sure that these articles at least appear to align with the role of newspaper as autonomous image formation agents (Hanusch, 2010, p. 70). Since the credibility and constitutive effect of discourse can be damaged by the obvious marketing purpose, articles that include a business name either in headline or lead were excluded from detailed textual analysis. However, it is worth noticing that articles in the travel section of the NYT written for promoting and branding one or several places in Shanghai, for example, a restaurant or hotel, are not rare. With headlines like Hotel Review or Restaurant Report, this kind of commercial articles can be easily differentiated and identified by readers as advertorial. Last but not least, the content selected for textual analysis should be structured around a specific tourism subject of interest to general readers and potential visitors. More importantly, it should focus on representing one or more aspects of the city. With this criterion, article genres like interviews with expats living in Shanghai and basic information provision for visiting are excluded, as the subject matter has limited influence on destination representation. Procedure of Data Analysis Having decided on the corpus for analysis, I moved on to data analysis using the CDA framework that I discussed earlier in the chapter to discover the patterns of representation and understand the way it is evolving in the context of social and cultural changes (Fairclough, 2000, p. 311). In order to familiarize myself with the data better in a preliminary reading, I created a spreadsheet for gathering important information related to each article, and the information categories are: 1) publishing date 2) author information 3) nutshell of article 4) 46

52 theme 5) article structure 6) participants 7) notes for preliminary reading. With the primary aims of identifying themes, writing structure and subject matter in mind, I started the first round of close reading, the main objective of which was to synthesize the content of the travel writings for further study. Since I aimed to discover the development and changes of the NYT travel writings, which hypothetically inform how the power relation and ideologies beneath the tourism discourse change, all the possible themes embedded in textual representation were identified and taken note of. No themes were specifically searched for while reading. During the preliminary close reading, there were repeated themes that emerged, and several article categories were simultaneously identified, as they can be distinguished by their subject matter and the way of structuring themes in them. Furthermore, some of the articles are under the same sub-sections of the NYT travel section, for example, Frugal Traveler, 36 Hours and What s Doing, each of which has its distinguishable pattern and flow of writing, for instance, how the topical paragraphs are structured. It is worth noticing that the NYT travel section is comprised of assorted categories of articles and some of them stand out from the others with distinct subject matter and structure. And I present the detailed descriptions of the categories in the next chapter. After the preliminary close reading and filling the spreadsheet with important basic information about the articles, I proceeded with second and third rounds of reading. Following the CDA analysis framework, I conducted the close reading for the objectives of identifying recurring themes, coding the themes and, moreover, searching for the absence of certain themes which had been addressed in other years of publication investigated (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). As stated by Fairclough (1995), choices entail exclusion as well as inclusion - what is absent from the text is no less significant than what is presented in the text. According to Fairclough (2000), linguistic analysis is sensitive to absences as well as presences in texts - to representations, 47

53 categories of participant, constructions of participant identity or participant relations which are not found in a text" (p. 312). With that in mind, I carefully investigated themes that were discovered in the manner to make sure that I hadn t found only what I intentionally searched for, and I also compared one article with another to identify the absent. In this stage of analysis, all the 30 articles were copied and pasted to a quantitative analysis software called QDA Miner. Under the project named NYT - Shanghai, all the articles are arranged chronologically. After that, I created the first group of codes on QDA Miner platform, which was based on all the themes of tourist experience/activity/attraction in Shanghai that I found in the preliminary reading. After reading and coding the passages according to the tourist experience/activity/attraction, salient themes emerged clearly. In this phase, all of the themes coded are merely based on the topic that was written about rather than the meanings conveyed in the articles. Since tourism discourse is like a pastiche of all kinds of tourist experience and behavior, there is such a wide variety of themes in it that a more realistic approach is to code the themes according to what is talked about first. Moreover, it is shown that some of the tourist activities or attractions are perpetuated as important themes in the NYT travel writings, while some of them appeared just once or only a few times in a certain period. Through the first round of coding, summarizing the themes addressed by the NYT, and investigating the presence and absence, timing and frequency of themes, a rough picture of the shifts and changes of topics in the 31 years of publication could be achieved. After this step, I took the approach of allocating and classifying single themes according to how the basic themes are related with each other, and structured to construct subtopics of meanings. And through this step, recurring subtopics emerged, which comprise discourse strands. The objective of this step is to identify different discourse strands, the flows of discourse that centre on a common topic as 48

54 defined by Wodak and Meyer (2009, p. 46). These discourse strands, as indicated by Wodak and Meyer (2001), have a diachronic and synchronic dimension, and it is significant to cut though a discourse strand at various points in time and place. By analyzing these cuts, the changes and continuities of discourse can be understood. Since the objective of this study is to examine the evolving representations of Shanghai in Western tourism discourse and to understand how the discursive practice of travel writing is in a dialectical relationship with its broader context, my analysis was based on both micro-level textual analysis and macro-level socio-historical analysis according to the CDA framework. As for the micro-level textual analysis, I primarily focus on 1) the structure of the articles; 2) themes addressed by the articles; 3) sayings and cliches; 4) symbolism. The rhetoric will be touched on, but it is not the major focus of my textual analysis. Moreover, the articles from more recent publication are emphasized, and the earlier articles were used for comparing and tracing the changes of discourse. Through identifying and analyzing the shifts and changes found in the tourism discourse, the textual analysis explores the ideological underpinning and power relations beneath destination representations of Shanghai. 49

55 Chapter 4 Analysis In this chapter, I will on textual analysis of the NYT travel writings, which is embedded in ideologies and is the site reflecting power relations and discursive struggles. To be specific, I examine the shifts and changes of the articles representing Shanghai in the travel section, in terms of selecting, structuring and representing themes, and seek to trace the changing pattern of representation. As has been presented in the introduction chapter, much of the city has been renovated and transformed for driving economic development and attracting foreign investment. Apart from that, the influence of globalization has brought a huge makeover to the cityscape, which also impacts the tourism industry of Shanghai. I argue that the NYT travel writings covering Shanghai are increasingly commercialized along with the progress of Shanghai s globalization and modernization, which is reflected in following aspects: 1) Themes related with Western lifestyle and consumption become dominant in the discourse, while at the same time, local culture is increasingly marginalized in the discourse; culture and history tends to be backgrounded or commodified as symbols for enhancing consumption; 2) Heavier marketing language that embellishes Shanghai and enhances consumption is used in representation. The tourism discourse of Shanghai is homogenized, which cultivates routinized ways of knowing Shanghai as a Chinese metropolis with Western characteristics and ways of consumption. I want to show that the conventional tourism discourse of Shanghai is gradually mixed with marketing language from tourism industry, which reflects a mixture of genres and discourses (Fairclough, 2000, p. 313). For the convenience of analysis, the corpus is categorized into five groups, which are recommendation, feature story, background story, personal travel experience and trend story. 50

56 The primary criterion for categorizing them is how themes are differently structured. The table below presents these categories and their descriptions: Category Article name Description Recommen dation (9 in total) Feature story (4 in total) Background story (6 in total) Personal travel experience (4 in total) What's Doing In Shanghai (Mar 4, 1984) What's Doing In Shanghai (Dec 31, 1995) What's Doing In Shanghai (Apr 19, 1998) A World of Choices: Shanghai (Apr 21, 1996) Menus to Match Shanghai's Vitality (Dec 3, 2000) Going to Shanghai (Dec 5, 2004) 36 Hours In Shanghai (Oct 15, 2006) 36 Hours In Shanghai (Mar 10, 2009) 36 Hours In Shanghai (Nov 28, 2013) Warming Up In Shanghai (Nov 3, 1985) Shipping Out From Shanghai (Jan 22, 1989) Shanghai's Fields of Green (Apr 23, 1995) An Outsider s Camera Provides a Ticket Into a Secret World (June 10, 2007) Fall In Shanghai: Time for Crab Rush (Sept 14, 1986) The Waterfront Heart of the City (Jan 22, 1989) A Shanghai Museum With Western Flair (Nov 5, 1996) A Vessel for China's Treasures (Apr 18, 1999) A Stretch of Old Shanghai (Nov 29, 2010) Jewish Life In Shanghai's Ghetto (June 19, 2012) Shanghai, Modern But Still Exotic (Sept 22, 2002) Shanghai, a Far East Feast (Oct 9, 2005) In Shanghai, Balancing the Past, the Future and a Budget (Jan 21, 2007) 51 The body paragraphs are distinctly structured according to different themes of travel experience. More often than not, they have sub-headings to mark each section for different theme, which recommends to readers different travel experiences in Shanghai. Based on author s personal experience in Shanghai, which is not strictly structured according to themes or timeline. Different from recommendation piece, these feature stories deliver opinion and attitude toward what an author saw and experienced in Shanghai. Featuring one culture, tourist attraction or place in Shanghai, these articles are informative and provide rich background stories about how a place, an organization or a culture comes to be where it is now. Also based on author s personal experience in Shanghai, articles in this category are different from feature stories, for they are

57 Trend stories (7 in total) Shanghai On a Dime? Pretty Close (Mar 15, 2013) In Old Mills, an Artists' Colony (Jul 3, 2005) The Art Crowd is Heading to Shanghai (Dec 10, 2006) A High-Fashion Lane in Shanghai (Mar 4, 2007) For a City With Everything Else, Design Hotels (Mar 11, 2007) New Day for Shanghai Nights (June 25, 2009) A Low-Rise Shanghai Market (June 2, 2011) An Arts Explosion Takes Shanghai (Nov 5, 2015) Table 1: Overview of the article categories in the NYT travel section structured based on chronological order. Infused with different tourist activities and experience, these articles emphasize narratives rather than delivering opinion or attitude. Introducing trendy things that happened recently and are having impact in Shanghai, for example, art scenes, fashion boutiques and design hotels, these articles provide background stories of how a trend came into being, and they also give outstanding examples of it. Among these five categories, the recommendation article is perpetuated as an enduring genre throughout the publication of the NYT travel section, while the other genres occur less frequently. Although the trend story appeared much later than the other genres, it became a prominent way of bringing new themes to the NYT travel section. The first trend story, In Old Mills, an Artists' Colony (Jul 3, 2005), was published in 2005, which introduces Shanghai s newly-opened art galleries at 50 Moganshan Road. Six other trend articles were published after, each of which had a new theme that had not been written about before. Another finding from diachronic analysis is that later articles are more infused with recommendation and instrumental information for consumption, while the earlier pieces focus more on constructing Shanghai s social and cultural landscape through cohesive accounts. In the following sections, more expansion will be provided to show how the evolution of genres reflects the commercialization trend of the NYT travel writings. 52

58 Heavier Weight of Consumption in Writings In order to show that the tourism discourse of Shanghai is becoming commercialized, the heavier weight of consumption themes related with goods and services, such as food, drinks and hotel accommodation, which causes culture and history to be backgrounded, is discussed in this section first. An important finding from diachronic analysis is that more recommendations of stores/restaurants/bars emerged and were normalized as an essential part of travel writings as shown by the pattern of how they were incorporated into consumption themes. In addition, consumption themes, which used to be clearly separated from other themes like sightseeing are now more craftily interwoven into writings, which reflects the characteristics of commercial discourse and that consumption is legitimized as culture. Along with the increased proportion of writing related to consumption is the heavier use of marketing language that magnifies its excitement or pleasure, which is discussed as another major point later in this chapter. More importantly, culture and history are now presented and commodified as symbols for the purpose of enhancing consumption. To be brief, consumption is foregrounded in the NYT travel section, considering the overall weight of consumption themes and how they are represented. The dominant discourse shifts from culture and heritage of historical landmarks to the enjoyment of goods and services in historical landmarks. Although in early writings, hotel/restaurant/store recommendations are inevitably included for the purpose of facilitating trip planning, the boundary between representing tourist attractions as historical landmarks and representing tourist attractions as places for consumption is quite clear. Later on, the boundary is blurred, as the excitement of getting an extraordinary eating/drinking/shopping experience is emphasized instead of the history and exoticism of the landmark itself. 53

59 Moreover, the heavier emphasis on consumption is also reflected in that themes and cultural symbols related to Western lifestyle and consumption prevail in the discourse. And it is also reflected by the emergence of trend articles from Seemingly bringing new themes related with Shanghai s trendy, newly renovated spots into the tourism discourse and advocating progressive lifestyle and ideas, trend articles follow a pattern of advertising and promoting local businesses, which shows the shifting emphasis of the NYT travel section on consumption and the commercialization trend. Culture and history are commodified as symbols to enhance consumption. One of the significant evidences showing the commercialization trend of current NYT travel writings lies in the discrepancy of the way that nostalgic past and local culture is incorporated into writings. Colonial past and local culture used to mark the exoticism of Shanghai, and differentiate Shanghai from other tourist destinations. In early articles, cultural symbols and historical background were selected as the elements constituting the exotic facade of Shanghai s historical landmarks. In later articles, these purposefully selected elements are commodified for enhancing the value of goods and services provided in historical building. It is stated that tourism transforms difference into global discourse of consumerism, a process by which otherness becomes a commodity to be consumed (Cole, 2008, p. 21). If the otherness of early tourism discourse of Shanghai is about the exoticism and idiosyncrasy of perishable sights along with their culture and history, then it evolves to be about the unique experience of consumption in the same historical landmarks. Moreover, the exoticism of historical landmarks in later articles is constituted by signs and symbols that embody the fragments from local culture and history. These cultural symbols are used to mark the differences of the goods and services 54

60 presented in the travel writings from those of reader s home country, which conceals the sameness of consumption and enhances the exotic flavor. One example from an early travel writing is provided to show how exoticism was previously constructed to deliver the idiosyncrasy of historical landmarks. The Bund, the long, winding embankment along the river in the eastern part of Shanghai, welcomes dozens of freighters and hundreds of sampans every day. It is a crossroads where American executives run into martial arts experts, where canvas-covered skiffs glide close to Mercedes limousines, where Tudor-style buildings overshadow common brick houses and where foghorns muffle the murmur of busy pedestrians... Unlike the simple houses or small inner-city flats that most Chinese live in, the buildings here are grand, stark reminders of Western imperialism, yet symbols too of Shanghai's old opulence, of its history and of its industry when it outshone the rest of China. (WuDunn, 1989, January 22) In this excerpt, American executives, Mercedes limousines, and Tudor-style buildings - these images from Western culture are placed with the purpose of contrasting to images of traditional Chinese characteristics, so as to enhance the charm of the Bund. Images like martial arts experts and canvas-covered skiffs glide, although different and remote from the native culture of the Western readership of the NYT, can be recognized as of Chinese origin. Orderly organized in binary structure, these sets of purposely selected symbolic images are being used to construct exoticism, which is defined by Victor Segalen (2002) as aesthetics of diversity. More importantly, these images not only denote the current cultural contrast and mixture at the Bund, but also connote the colonial past of Shanghai when the Western and Eastern influence coexisted. Through evoking a past period when Shanghai was under Western 55

61 influence, and juxtaposing it with its present in depiction, nostalgia for other times and places (Holland & Huggan, 2000, p. 8) is generated. Moreover, Western imperialism called by WuDunn (1989, January 22) is directly referred to later when the old buildings are mentioned again, which echos with the historical background of Shanghai that is implied in the sets of images representing the mix of the East and West. Such representation that evokes exoticism and nostalgia of the Bund is common in earlier travel writings. The Bund is represented as the landmark of Shanghai where stand the stately old buildings that had been banks and trading houses (Selvin, 1985, November 3); it is the strip of pre-revolutionary Beaux Arts buildings - all gussied up with burnished brass doors, Gothic columns and Chinese tile roofs (Charle, 1989, January 22); it is a place that evokes Shanghai's past (Faison, 1995, December 31). The Bund is staged as a place where historical events once happened but now have been displaced with only the facade of those old building left for reminiscence. With the Western aspects of the Bund being highlighted, it was necessary for authors of early NYT travel articles to supply Western readers with brief background knowledge or descriptions outlining the colonial past of Shanghai, given that not much of such knowledge had been previously imparted in the travel section. Thus, in early the stage of the NYT travel section reporting on Shanghai, being informative was of considerable importance among all genres, as historical background was an inseparable supplement to justify the Western aspects of Shanghai in narratives. A typical example can be like this: Unlike the rest of China, which is laden with ancient history and custom, Shanghai is a city of migrants, who poured in after Europeans seized its port over 150 years ago and started trading. The mixture of Western capital and know-how with Chinese 56

62 entrepreneurship and labor transformed Shanghai into the most cosmopolitan city in Asia in the 1920s and 30s. (Faison, 1995, December 31) The Bund, one of the landmarks of Shanghai, was repeatedly promoted and foregrounded as the symbol of Shanghai s touristic image in early travel writings of the NYT, as well as in other discourses and publications such as postcards and magazines, which can be dated back to the early 20 th century (Wasserstrom, 2006). Renowned for being a treaty port with important commercial, military and recreational functions, the Bund was historically represented as the core of Shanghai as well as in the Far East before 1949 (Henriot, 2010). The Bund fell into relative obscurity after 1949, while it was chosen to turn into a tourist attraction by the municipal government and later promoted as a must see place in contemporary guides in the late 1980s (Henriot, 2010). The Bund became a sight that serves as a symbolic marker (MacCannell, 2013, p. 110) for Shanghai, whose physical image represents the city. In this sense, the shifts and changes of its representation align with and, at some level, also shed light on how Shanghai is generally viewed and shaped in discourse. As the symbolic marker for Shanghai, the Bund is predominantly represented in early articles as emblematic and signifier of Shanghai s exoticism and nostalgic past, while later it is superficially represented as symbol and a constitutive part of the diversity of Shanghai. In early articles, the Bund is portrayed with details and authors own observations. There was once an aura around the Bund, as the facade of it was glorified and romanticized, the origin of its name was introduced, and the history and legend around it was circulated. In the early depictions and narratives of it, consumption was rarely mentioned. 57

63 In later articles, however, the Bund becomes a prominent locus for high-end consumption in representations. The following excerpt from the Hours In Shanghai shows an example of how consumption is blended in writings and foregrounded. You can t avoid the Bund. Across the river from Pudong, this waterfront stretch of Art Deco and other edifices is Shanghai s signature promenade and a hub of upscale restaurants and bars. At night, its floodlit facades offer an unparalleled vantage point for marveling at the giant light show that is Pudong. So go for a nightcap at the Glamour Bar (No. 5 on the Bund, sixth floor; ), a perennially popular lounge with a 1930s inflection. (Chen, 2009, March 10) The Bund is indicated as a necessary part of a trip in Shanghai. Presented as Shanghai s signature promenade and a hub of upscale restaurants and bars, the Bund is, on the one hand, introduced as the symbol of Shanghai, while on the other hand, it is the locus where high-end facilities for consumption assemble. And these two aspects of the Bund juxtapose with each other and are given with the same level of weight in introduction. It is no longer the emblem of Shanghai s colonial past and Western imperialism (WuDunn, 1989, January 22). With the image of Shanghai being stereotypically shaped as a Chinese city of Western look in early writings, as well as in other media outlets, it seems to be unnecessary to restate history and provide readers with details for them to mentally picture the landscape of Shanghai. More importantly, with the shift of focusing more on consumption, historical background gives way to the priority of constructing the pleasure of consuming goods and services for the target audience through the marketing language that dramatizes and exaggerates the experience. Generalizing phrases like Art Deco edifices and floodlit facades that echo with the widely circulated image of the Bund, are presumably sufficient for representation of the landmark. Further details 58

64 and historical background are compromised, considering the limited space of the article, which is supposed to promote a variety of consumption themes. It is also worth considering that a considerable portion of audience of travel articles read or search relevant information with at least some expectation about or intention of visiting the destination, since travel section in newspapers, different from travel literature, is designed for readers who already know something about the place (Hannigan, 2013). Thus, readers can still be able to identify the place if the narrative just stays sketchy and bypasses the culture and historical background related to it, which rationalizes and lays the ground for the heavier emphasis on consumption later. Instead of making meticulous efforts to portray the Bund, the practical function of the Bund is pointed out, which is offering a vantage point for a night view that can be enjoyed in a popular lounge housed in an historical building. The NYT travel section is more aligned with the purpose of tourism, which is to escape the everyday existence (Hanusch, 2010, p. 72), and take on the responsibility of instructing various ways of touristic consumption to help readers achieve that goal. Another example showing the blurring of the boundary between culture and consumption is provided as below: Shanghai s historic Bund hasn t looked this good since Noël Coward and Charlie Chaplin were party guests in the city s glamorous prewar years. As part of the city s sprucing up for the 2010 World Expo, the concession era strip underwent a three-year restoration that moved most of the traffic underground and widened the riverside promenade to create a pleasant place to stroll in the evenings (minus the crowds). Several iconic properties have also recently returned to their former splendor. Splurge on a 500-renminbi glass of Yao Ming s Cabernet Sauvignon - or a more reasonably priced bottle from the extensive wine list - on the rooftop bar at the House of 59

65 Roosevelt, a neo-classical building restored by a company run by Theodore Roosevelt s great-grandson Tweed. Or drop by the Long Bar at the Waldorf Astoria, a 110-foot-long recreation of the original Long Bar at the former Shanghai Club, an exclusive British gentleman s club that became a KFC in the 1990s. (Bergman, 2013, November 28) It is clearly demonstrated in this excerpt that consumption is portrayed as culture, and culture is interwoven into consumption. The old buildings at historic Bund look good and have returned to their former splendor because of the renovation of bars and restaurants that bring back the charm from Shanghai s colonial past. By indicating the building s connection with Theodore Roosevelt s great-grandson and pointing out Long Bar s origin as former Shanghai Club, places are granted with historical meaning and significance through the inclusion of their background story and history. Besides that, Yao Ming as a symbolic figure is mentioned when describing the expensive Cabernet Sauvignon, which endows social meanings to the simple experience of drinking wine at a bar. The value of old buildings now lies in the exclusive consumption and experience you might not get anywhere else. More importantly, culture and history marks that exclusiveness and are commodified to add nostalgic and exotic flavor to consumption. Thus, it can be concluded that cultural symbols are no longer utilized merely to construct the exotic facade of Shanghai but rather to enhance consumption in later writings. The trend of commercialization of the NYT travel section is clearly demonstrated by the intention of stressing the marketable value of goods and services through interweaving cultural symbols in writings. It is demonstrated through the examples that culture and history in more current travel writings are either backgrounded or presented for the purpose of enhancing consumption. 60

66 Western lifestyle and consumption become dominant themes. Another finding from analyzing and comparing the themes from early and later articles of the NYT travel section is that themes related with local culture and tourist attractions are substituted by those related with Western lifestyle and consumption. Before Menu to Match Shanghai s Vitality (Simonds, 2000, December 3), the first article that includes a description of a dining experience in a Western restaurant opened by an Australian chef, all the themes related with either dinning or shopping were about places that are locally owned and reflected local lifestyle. Similarly, the narratives of trying Western food in old buildings exist in earlier writings, which is for the purpose of showing Shanghai s connection with Western culture and lifestyle and the diversity it embodies. For example, the 1984 What s Doing In Shanghai shows a good example: Shanghai is the only Chinese city with a tradition of Western cuisine. The Hong Fangzi, or Red House, at 37 South Shanxi Road was called Chez Louis in the old days. Young men take their dates there to show off with a knife and fork. The restaurant is known for its baked clams ($2.50) and vanilla souffle ($3). Quasi-French entrees like sole meuni ere range up to $3.50. The Jinjiang Club, in the old French Club on Maoming Road, offers candlelight dining to live classical string music or old Western pop songs. Most entrees cost about $3, indifferent steaks about $6. For a flaming finale, order omelet Vesuvius ($3), a type of baked Alaska set ablaze with a sorghum liquor called maotai. (Wren, 1984, March 4) The two restaurants are introduced to construct the idiosyncrasy of Shanghai as it is the only Chinese city with a tradition of Western cuisine. The two restaurants, Hong Fangzi and Jinjiang Club were both state-owned restaurants serving Western cuisine at that time, and were 61

67 frequented by both locals and foreigners. Presenting these Western restaurants in early articles is still for showing an aspect of Shanghai s local lifestyle, which should be differentiated from the representations of Western restaurants owned by foreign investors. As stated earlier in this chapter, conveying the exoticism of Shanghai used to be the emphasis of representation, themes related with local cuisines and lifestyle remained dominant. However, later on those once salient themes such as visiting old town and having tea, trying Shanghai cuisine in local restaurants were replaced by consumption themes reflecting Western lifestyle and the cosmopolitan characteristic of Shanghai. Themes related with consuming goods and services targeting Western consumption preferences, such as drinking wine and having brunch, are focused on in later articles. Themes reflecting local lifestyle are much backgrounded, as they are incongruous with the exciting and cosmopolitan image shaped in the discourse. In the article, In Shanghai, Balancing the Past, the Future and a Budget (Gross, 2007, January 21), it is ironic that the author wrote about dining around at Western restaurants, a Japanese restaurant and visiting a gay bar, and he indicated that the next morning, I woke up feeling terrible: I realized I had hardly eaten any Chinese food yet. The connotation is expressed in the article that international coterie of businessmen currently [is] transforming Shanghai into a new symbol of globalization. In many later articles, the emphasis on shaping Shanghai as a Chinese city embracing Western culture and lifestyle implies and aligns with the fact that the westernization and makeover of Shanghai are for the purpose of attracting foreign investment and boosting economic development. Such implications, on the one hand, reveal that the heavier emphasis on Western consumption and lifestyle is not just a choice of representation made by the newspaper, as in fact the changes of themes are partially influenced by the changes of social reality. On the other hand, being neutral or 62

68 ambiguous to Shanghai s westernization, the attitude and reaction of the NYT travel section toward such transformation should not be simply overlooked. One piece of evidences showing the NYT travel section s tacit acceptance of the makeover in Shanghai is that contradiction and social conflict incurred by Shanghai s modernization is downplayed or even neglected in the writings. Negative outcomes of modernization, such as the demolishing of old buildings for the development of shopping areas, Figure 3. The Pudong district of Shanghai, left, may be the financial and commercial hub of China. But much of the city can be experienced free, or close to it. Even on a budget of just $50 a day, Shanghai can be more than manageable. Mark Ralston/ Agence France - Presse (Kugel, 2013, March 15) Figure 4. The Pudong Financial District seen from the Bund district in Shanghai. Qilai Shen for The New York Times (Barboza, 2006, October 15) are skipped over, so that reader s attention can be directed to the bright side of Shanghai s transformation. Moreover, the splendor of the renovated cityscape is magnified and presented as the symbol of China s coolest metropolis (Barboza, 2006, October 15), although the hypergrowth behind the construction of skyscrapers and floodlit buildings is pointed out as well. 63