Abstract

In a context of resurgent nationalist fervor, we need to better understand how nationalism sustains itself. In this paper, we explore the role of consumer experience in internalizing national ideology. If we define ideology as a system of ideas and myths about a nation (Althusser, 1969), we are interested in the way consumer experience helps assimilate these representations.

The context of our study is the phenomenon of Chinese overseas tourism, one of the more significant consumer trends in the world today. Even if the Covid crisis has temporarily halted this growth, Asia’s rapidly growing middle-classes are increasingly looking to leisure locations outside their own country to spend their holidays, to the extent that Asian tourists now represent the main driver of growth for global tourism..

Chinese overseas tourism is also a fertile terrain to investigate the relationship between ideology and consumer experience. Indeed, the Chinese government sees foreign travel as a soft power to exert political and cultural influences, as well as a political tool to exert pressure on other countries.

We build from this rich ideological terrain to study the role of consumer experience in appropriating national ideology. We describe how some Chinese tourists use travel experiences to live, internalize and even refine national ideology. When they travel abroad, Chinese consumers are hailed as Chinese, and this process foregrounds their identity. The travel experience potentially provides a setting for feeling the main emotions of Chinese national ideology: pride and humiliation. Finally travelers manage to create their own version of national ideology, creating new symbols for national ideology but also their own stories. Together these symbols and stories help travelers add their own story to national ideology.