ASPIRING TO BE GLOBAL: LANGUAGE, MOBILITIES,
AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN A TOURISM VILLAGE IN CHINA GAO SHUANG
(MA, BA) A THESIS SUBMITTED
FOR THE JOINT DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGAGE & LITERATURE
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
AND
CENTRE FOR LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATION
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

2014
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Acknowledgements

The completion of this thesis has benefited from many conversations with many
people over the years. I am all too aware that their kindness and generosity
deserve much more than a brief mentioning here, but let me try to count the ways.
I am most proud and grateful for having two wonderful supervisors, Joseph
Sung-Yul Park and Ben Rampton. I could not have started this research project
without the encouragement of Joseph Park. It is through many discussions with

process. I am grateful, for instance, for having a pleasant conversation with a
business owner whom I woke up from his nap in a comfortably sunny afternoon,
for being warmly accepted as an unexpected stranger visitor into someone’s home
in an early morning, and for the cheerful congratulations I got after, in her words,
‘finally getting into the backyard of my enemy’, that is, being allowed into a local
language school. I learnt so much from them, and was often overwhelmed by their
hospitality. I can only hope the readers would appreciate their stories, if not the
way I told them.
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For company and friendship along the PhD journey, I thank Dr Feng Dezheng,
Dr Zhang Yiqiong, Dr Liu Yu, Dr Dang Zhiya, Dr Bae Sohee, Si Qiuxue, Wang
Jie, Tina Yang, Khong Beng Choo, Yurni Irwati Said-Sirhan, and Stephen Wong.
They have been sources of joy and wisdom.
Finally, my deepest thanks to my parents for their best love at every step of my
life. 谨以此文献给我的父母！

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Table of Contents

assumptions 60
3.2.2 In the field: Working to learn and learning to work 68
3.3 Some brief stories 77
3.3.1 ‘You are here to learn English, aren’t you?’ 78
3.3.2 ‘What do you mean by “global village”?’ 85
3.4 Conclusion 88
Chapter 4 Commodification of Place, Consumption of Identity: The
Sociolinguistic Construction of a ‘Global Village’ 90
4.1 Introduction 90
4.2 The recent socio-historical transformation of West Street 92
4.3 West street as brand: English, tourism and (post-)modernity 95
4.4 Semiotics of the ‘global village’ 101
4.5 Performance, stance and identity: Post-tourists and anti-tourists 107
4.5.1 Post-tourists 108
4.5.2 Anti-tourists 112
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4.6 Conclusion 117
Chapter 5 Tensions of Space in the ‘Global Village’ 120
5.1 Introduction 120
5.2 Historical transformation of the ‘global village’ 125
5.2.1 Till the late 1990s: A laisser-faire West Street 125
5.2.2 First wave of development: ‘Global Village’ and ‘English
Corner’ 132
5.2.3 Second wave of development: Geographical expansion and
business investment 136
5.3 Types of Space in the ‘Global Village’ 155
5.4 Living in a Changing ‘Global Village’ 161
5.4.1 Closing-down and Moving-out 161
5.4.2 Local foreigners’ niche of sociability in Yangshuo 169
5.5 Conclusion 177


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Summary

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the sociolinguistics of
globalization by examining a tourism site in Yangshuo County, Guangxi Zhuang
Autonomous Region in southern China. A former residential neighborhood street
West Street (西街 Xī Jiē) in Yangshuo has been gaining increasing popularity
among domestic Chinese tourists, known as a ‘global village’ and ‘English
Corner’, as Yangshuo transformed from an agriculture-based into a tourism-based
economy during the past three decades. This observed tourism development in
West Street differs from existing research in other tourism communities (see e.g.
Heller 2003; Coupland, Garret and Bishop 2005; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010) in
that its sociohistorical transformation involves the re-evaluation of non-local,
instead of local, linguistic resources. This study investigates this socio-historical
change as an issue for the sociolinguistics of mobility (Blommaert 2010), wherein
the English language, along with other semiotic resources, is appropriated and
commodified for domestic Chinese tourists. Specifically, it seeks to address how
has West Street become a ‘global village’ and ‘English Corner’? What are the
tensions arising from this socio-historical change? And what is the role of
language and communication in the tensions that arise from the re-imagination of
West Street as a global village and English Corner?
To address these questions, I look at data collected both online and during
three-month fieldwork. These include tourism promotional discourses, tourist
writings online, (participant) observations, interviews, field notes, documents, and
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signage. In analyzing these data, I draw on insights from sociolinguistics, tourism
studies, human geography, and applied linguistics to provide multidimensional
analytical perspectives into the ‘global village’, including place-making, tourist
identity and stance, multifunctionality of space, and educational tourism.
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List of Tables

Table 2.1 A brief summary of key issues 28
Table 3.1 Businesspersons interviewed 74
Table 3.2 Student-interviewees 75
Table 3.3 Teacher-interviewees 84
Table 5.1 Summary of historical change of West Street 154
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List of Figures

Figure 6.5 Handout ‘On holiday’ 213
Figure 6.6 ‘I am sorry for speaking Chinese’ 214
Figure 6.7 ‘looking for language exchange partner’ 215

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List of Maps

Map 1.1 Geographical location of Yangshuo 2
Map 5.1 West Street and surroundings (Impressionistic) 139 1

Chapter 1 Introduction


towards Yangshuo. Like going to other countrysides, it takes some time to reach
Yangshuo County from the city. But unlike most journeys, the time on the road
may not necessarily be very dull. As the bus leaves the city of Guilin behind, the
views along the road become refreshing and soothing – rivers, Karst mountains,
extensive farm lands. And one could have a more intimate experience of the
natural beauty if one chooses to take a boat down the famous Li River running
across the County from the city (see Figure 1.1). Indeed, Yangshuo has always
been attractive. It is unique and well known for its Karst geography among
travelers, and actually used to be reserved as a natural resort for imperial officials
back in the Song Dynasty (1100s).

Figure 1.1 Yangshuo scenery. Photo by author, 2011.
As we arrived, we quickly found a nice but cheap hotel to stay (a triple room
for only 40 yuan per night) near Yangshuo bus station, and then we were ready to
exhaust the place and ourselves - cycling, mountain climbing, bamboo rafting,

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and others. In the evening a friend suggested that we went for a walk in a local
street, West Street (西街 Xī Jiē). A traditional neighborhood street on the west
bank, West Street winds into the town from the dock of the Li River. This
particular street over the last three decades has been the place for many travelers
to take a short break after their journey, or to base themselves if they plan to
further explore the countryside. It is not a very long street, several hundred meters,
paved by large uneven black marble stones, and lined by Ming-Qing style
residential buildings (see Figure 1.2). But further into the street, it is a different
world. In contrast to the laid-back countryside, West Street is busy. At night,
colorful neon lights up the street. Before you realize it, you are part of the crowd,
passing by souvenir shops, artistic craft tables, seeing people of different colors
chatting over beer, coffee, or pizza. I remember watching a white-bearded


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of Welsh for the heritage tourism of mining. Thurlow and Jaworski (2010)
examine minority language textbooks at tourism sites and television tourism
programs where minority languages are used to produce a sense of ‘exotic’.
The case of West Street, however, differs from the above cases in that its
sociohistorical transformation involves the re-evaluation of non-local, instead of
local, resources. While located in a region with multiple ethnolinguistic minorities,
most notably Zhuang, the tourism development of West Street has been
capitalizing on the English language, as well as other semiotic resources, as
opposed to ethnolinguistic varieties. In recent years, the image of foreigners living
happily in Yangshuo figures prominently in the media, in particular in tourism
promotional discourses targeting at domestic Chinese tourists. It has actually been
described as a ‘global village’ and an ‘English Corner’ wherein western elements,
the English language in particular, are highlighted whereas indigenous local
elements are downplayed if not erased.
This study therefore seeks to explore the tourism site of West Street, Yangshuo
as an important case for contributing to our understanding of sociolinguistics of
mobility. Jan Blommaert (2010) in his recent book The Sociolinguistics of
Globalization observes that there are now shifting perspectives into language and
society, one of which involves shift
‘from a view in which language is narrowly tied to a community, a time and
a place, and in which language is primarily seen as having local functions,
to a view in which language exists in and for mobility across space and time.
This shift, I would say, is conceptually far more momentous …, because it

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forces us to consider linguistic signs detached from their traditional locus of

research. In Chapter 2, I contextualize the present research in the larger research
field of the sociolinguistics of globalization and tourism, and provide a conceptual
framework for the present study. I show how tourism provides an important
domain for addressing the current concerns and questions of the sociolinguistics
of mobility. I also introduce the changing ideologies of tourism in China. Chapter
3 introduces the research site and field methods. I show how more specific
research questions emerged during my fieldwork as well as explaining issues of
field access, field methods, and constraints in data collection.
Chapter 4 to Chapter 6 present empirical analysis of Yangshuo from
multidimensional perspectives, drawing on insights from sociolinguistics, tourism
studies, human geography, and applied linguistics. Chapter 4 looks at how the so-
called ‘global village’ is established and in what specific ways it appeals to
domestic Chinese tourists. Through examining tourism discourses, this chapter
shows how the construction of the so-called ‘global village’ reproduces the
changing ideologies of English as a status marker. Nevertheless, it is also shown
that tourists through their post-tourism writings position themselves in varied
ways to this ‘global village’. This commodified sense of place is negotiated by

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tourists as they activate and (re-)work the social meaning of place through their
discursive practices. This highlights how place is a social construct, constantly
transformed in the process of socio-historical change, and also mediated by
people’s conceptualization, imagination and experience.
This transformation from a former neighborhood to a ‘global village’, however,
is not without tensions. In Chapter 5, I explore how different social groups are
involved in and are variously positioned in relation to each other during this
historical process of dramatic change. Drawing on multiple data resources, I
delineate a three-phase account of the historical transformation, and explain
through this historical perspective how the spatiality of the ‘global village’ is