Geopolitical anxieties of tourism: (Im)mobilities of the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction

In February 2020, Massimiliano Martigli Jiang, a blindfolded Chinese-Italian man, loomed over a handwritten sign that read, ‘I am not a virus. I am a human. Eradicate the prejudice’ (Chen, 2020). As he stood in the streets of Florence, passersby stopped to take photos and offer their support to ameliorate COVID-inspired ‘Asian-phobia’ in Italy. Jiang’s silent protest was also a geopolitical gesture as he sought to challenge racist couplings of Asian-ness as a signifier for disease and contagion, thereby quelling geopolitical anxiety in the tourist mecca. Driven by the insecurity of uncertain and/or threatening geographical imaginaries, geopolitical anxieties—that is, anxieties related to the implications of geopolitical narratives and practices—have been heightened in the COVID-19 pandemic. Touristic encounters can both reinforce and challenge historically rooted and place-based geopolitical imaginaries which are never settled, but rather constitute an ongoing negotiation of meaning that is mapped onto people and places in both remarkably familiar and new ways in COVID times.

Critical historical geopolitics and the touristic encounter

While geopolitical anxiety has perhaps always punctuated the touristic encounter, COVID-19 has brought these symptoms into sharp relief. Airports, borders, and checkpoints provoke anxious biopolitical responses as they sort, categorize, and contain tourist bodies while social categories such as race, class, gender, and citizenship are operationalized at gatekeeping mechanisms (Fluri, 2009). Reponses to COVID-19 reveal heightened geopolitical anxieties that have unfolded in everyday and mediated tourism encounters. Scholars of critical geopolitics extend the field beyond traditional, state-centric models of physical landscape and territory to incorporate the everyday, bottom-up, and discursive framing of space and place (Agnew, 1989).

Tourism is a fundamental site through which geopolitical narratives are assembled. While host-guest relationships and the industry are co-constructed through myriad institutional, discursive, and material practices (e.g. passports, social media representations, selfie-sticks) (Gillen and Mostafanezhad, 2019), the media looms large in the mediation of encounters. Yet, geopolitical imaginaries are also critically mediated by historical experiences and representations that often bubble just below the surface. Early in the pandemic, racist narratives were played out globally where representations of ethnic difference became connotative of disease and culpability. For instance, the Wall Street Journal was criticized for its derogatory reference in an op-ed titled, ‘China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia’, associating Chinese ethnicity with ‘criminality, poverty, addiction, immoral behavior, even communism’ (Luu, 2020).

Drawing upon the ideas of Catherin Choy, Yam (2020) observes that ‘the “racist association of Chinese bodies as disease carriers” has roots in white supremacist and nativist fears of Asian migration in the late 19th century. White labor unions weaponized the stereotype to drum up support for a ban on Chinese labor immigration, arguing that Chinese diseases were more dangerous than “white” ones’. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, reportage described ‘Chinese looking’ tourists and residents being ousted from various places, mocked for their country’s exotic meat trade, subjected to unplanned health checks, and shunned on public transportation for their perceived threat of contagion (Pfanner, 2020; Reuters, 2020). In Europe, the stigmatization and proliferation of hate crimes against ‘Asian looking’ tourists and residents intensified (Widianto, 2020; Yam, 2020). Further, efforts to shape the geopolitical imaginary were enacted through the naming of the virus and identification of its origins. US President Donald Trump described the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) as the ‘Chinese virus’, while China hinted at its American origins. Elsewhere in East Asia, prejudice against Chinese tourists is often coupled with geopolitical fears of territorial control, and this anxiety materialized in Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s reference to the ‘Wuhan pneumonia’. As anthropologist Charlotte Setijadi explains, the powerful combination of Orientalist assumptions, political distrust, and health concerns stokes fears as people seek to identify a culprit (see Widianto, 2020).

Yet, in Thailand where Chinese tourists comprise 27% of the 40 million+ tourist market, residents sought solidarity. For example, signage at a food stall in Bangkok read: ‘“jiāyóu China, jiāyóu Wuhan”, which translates to “add oil,” meaning “keep fighting”’ to encourage Chinese tourists to get well and come back soon (Ratcliff, 2020). Significantly, geopolitical narratives of race are not unidirectional, and as Euro-American countries surpassed case counts in East Asia, the tides turned. Thailand’s Public Health Minister Anutin Chanvirakul waved masks in his hand as he loudly proclaimed, ‘“And the damn foreigners, damn tourists…. They should be kicked out of the country. Chinese and Asians, they all accept these masks. These damn Europeans…How do we know that they are not spreading the disease?’” (as quoted in Peck, 2020). Further, the widespread experience of ‘virus refugees’ (Gulsac, 2020) invigorated domestic forms of geopolitical anxiety as people from COVID-19 hotspots sought refuge in places with lower case counts. For instance, in Hawai’i, residents stood outside airports with signs that read, ‘Go Home!’, and in Jersey Shore, cars throughout the popular summer and second home destination adorned the bumper sticker, ‘Welcome to the shore. Now go home’ (Tully and Stowe, 2020).

Geoeconomics of the tourism industry

Encounters between both international and domestic tourists are mediated by the geostrategic discourses of geopolitical scripting and geoeconomic enframing (Sparke, 2007). Scripting is used by critical geopolitics scholars to describe the discursivity of geopolitical arguments. In tourism, geopolitical scripting is integral to place-making practices such as distinctions between mass and alternative tourism, and safe from dangerous destinations. Conversely, the tourism industry depends on geoeconomic enframings that obscure the structural inequalities through which it operates by downplaying ‘political and historical divisions while picturing a preferred future by framing-in the flat, smooth vision of space associated with utopian ideas about the so-called level playing field of free trade led development’ (Sparke, 2007: 340). COVID-19 emphasizes how travel mobilities are intertwined with work and leisure, and subsequently embedded into the global geopolitical and geoeconomic backdrop.

Contextually, the tourism sector’s global footprint is formidable. Heightened (im)mobilities have devastated local and national economies and strangled the long tail of the global tourism supply chain whose tentacles cut across myriad sectors from transportation to hospitality and accommodation as well as agriculture and financial services. Presto, the colossal global travel company that hosted 1.5 billion international trips in 2019, makes up a tenth of global employment and global GDP, earning US$1.6 trillion in exports (UNWTO, 2019, 2020), yet it was brought to its knees by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two standouts shaping the geo-economics of tourism currently buffeted by COVID-19 are the cruise industry and Airbnb. The cruise sector epitomizes questionable global practices where dominant multinational firms are domiciled in tax havens with opaque financial and governance arrangements and regularly flout environmental obligations (Cheer, 2020). Likewise, Airbnb is widely criticized for its role in transforming the complexion of some of the world’s most popular cities, driving real estate speculation and the displacement of long-term residents as well as acting as a catalyst for overtourism in cities such as Venice, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. For tourism’s critics, the disruption of both the cruise sector and Airbnb enflames extant geopolitical anxieties while also connoting opportunities to re-establish less corrosive forms of tourism. As the effects of COVID-19 linger, the urgency to revive tourism is intensifying as demonstrated in the imminent introduction of onerous screening and boarding arrangements for air travel (Rodriguez, 2020). Countered by howls of disdain that economic exigencies have been placed ahead of public health priorities and reveling in respite from tourists, many destinations will soon need to negotiate the uneasy tension between the geopolitical scripting and geoeconomic enframing of tourism.

Geopolitical anxiety and the Asia-Pacific pivot

Anxieties surrounding COVID-19 are amplified by the concurrent geopolitical recentering toward the Asia-Pacific. What began as a ‘China problem’ is now a global problem. Mobilities between China and the world came to a screeching halt, a reaction that stands in stark contrast to the 2003 coronavirus outbreak of SARS, which spread from mainland China through Hong Kong, an international transit city. By 2020, China itself was fully integrated into global transport routes. As the struggle outside of China to comprehend where Wuhan was located ensued, it quickly became evident that while many had previously not been able to locate it on a map, it was a thriving hub with a population larger than Manhattan.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs (2004) quipped that ‘as the world’s economic center of gravity shifts to Asia, U.S. pre-eminence will inevitably diminish’. Indeed, disparate outcomes of the pandemic highlight the geopolitical pivot toward the Asia-Pacific. While China brought the initial wave of the virus under control, it mocked the slow US response in its video, ‘Once Upon a Virus’. Regional counterparts also fared better—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and New Zealand are widely feted, and their actions and subsequent outcomes contrast strikingly with the Euro-American context. If the ‘Asian Century’ has been in the making since the term was first coined by Deng Xiaoping in 1988, then the COVID-19 response may be one of the clearest indicators yet that it has arrived.

Conclusion

Within the arsenal of geopolitical blame game contestants, the structural drivers and consequences of the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic are obscured by historically rooted, xenophobic narratives that are weaponized through touristic imaginaries of place. Navigating the uncertain future of global (im)mobility, scholars may consider how tourism encounters both challenge and reinforce geopolitical narratives, and by what means tourism geoeconomics reckons with its recently exposed wounds of structural inequality. Resuming travel will depend on the lifting of border restrictions and whether countries see each other as ‘safe enough’ to allow the flow of people-vectors between them. While highly contingent, geopolitical relations will underline reopening efforts. Current proposals to open a Trans-Tasman bubble between Australia and New Zealand, and fast track immigration clearance between the Republic of Korea and China, reveal how the future of travel may depend on collective self-care and well-managed geopolitical anxiety.