Yufei Guo | “Your Place is the Show” – A Multi-actor Analysis of Platformised Reality-TV-Induced Tourism in Wuzhen, China

Yufei Guo | “Your Place is the Show” – A Multi-actor Analysis of Platformised Reality-TV-Induced Tourism in Wuzhen, China | University of Groningen, Media, Cultural Industries & Society | Promotor(es): Prof. dr. Marianne Franklin | Supervisor(s): Dr. Qian Huang, Dr. Deborah Castro | 01 March 2025 – 28 February 2029 | yufei.guo[at]rug.nl

This project aims to explore screen tourism, the phenomenon of people traveling to places associated with audiovisual production. Most of the current knowledge on screen tourism is built on research conducted on film and TV series and mainly on Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries, but little is known about the dynamics between reality TV and tourism outside of the western context. This project thus aims to contribute to this research gap by studying reality-TV-induced tourism in China, specifically focusing on Wuzhen, a historic Chinese watertown in Zhejiang province re-developed for modern tourism, as a case study.

Over the past decade, Wuzhen has become a key site for art and culture development in China, featuring in multiple popular Chinese reality TV programs. These productions, in collaboration with local government and tourism enterprises, actively transform Wuzhen’s cultural and spatial reality, blurring distinctions between authenticity and performance. Informed by performativity theories, this project aims to explore: how is Wuzhen’s notion of place created through the (un)intentional performances of various stakeholders of Wuzhen’s development? How can we understand the phenomenon of reality-TV-induced tourism as a multi-actor network involving media producers, policymakers, local residents, and tourists?

Employing a multi-method qualitative approach, this research combines textual and audiovisual analysis, policy review, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with key stakeholders. By situating Wuzhen within the broader theoretical framework of performativity, the study contributes to screen tourism scholarship, offering new insights into how media representations transform into lived experiences and economic strategies in a rapidly evolving Chinese cultural landscape.