Yangtze River Cruise: a journey through the promotion of fluid developing places and controversial models of sustainability

This paper investigates Yangtze River cruise tourism within the Chongqing-Three Gorges section as an emerging niche category characterized by domestic tourism to the river’s growing visibility and opening up to more globalized forms of elite cruising over the past decade. Building on the assumption that the river cruise tourism sector, particularly in China’s peripheries, is an under-investigated field of research, this study questions the global elite cruise tour models versus local ones in pre-pandemic Chongqing by looking at the local development of the ecological zone. The analysis is based on statistics and discourse analysis of the place’s online promotion through the literally and metaphorically fluid space that characterizes the area. The integration of excerpts from a personal travel journal written during a cruise on a lower-middle-class service boat aims to dive deeper into the emotional atmosphere of the Yangtze River cruise in the historical conjuncture of institutional neoliberal transition. In doing so, the paper highlights the controversial socio-economic and ecological dynamics of interaction that emerge at the local level concerning tourism activities. It also reflects on how the concepts of sustainability and ecological civilization are politicized and flow into the local understanding of the place, facilitating the formation of new power networks and territorialization tactics.