ABSTRACT
Since its listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997, the town of Lijiang, in Northwestern Yunnan, has become one of the most popular tourist destinations in China. It is well known for the quaint Qing and Republican-era architecture of its remarkably intact old town, for its ancient music performed by Naxi musicians, and for its ‘Dongba culture’. Officials and tourism industry professionals have vigorously promoted Lijiang’s cultural landscape of quaint cobbled lanes and canals, ancient music, and Dongba ritual practice as a marketable brand. Lijiang has become an exemplary model for local officials who travel from all over China to investigate the secret to the town’s success. Yet they might learn just as much by staying home and watching television, surfing the web, or going to see a film, for these media have played a fundamental role in both promoting Lijiang as a marketable destination and branding it with certain meanings. And if those visiting officials were to recognize that many of the meanings and cultural practices associated with the media’s Lijiang brand have little correspondence with Lijiang as an actual place, they would learn perhaps the most valuable lesson of all. In this chapter, I refer to this lesson by using the Chinese idiom xu zhang sheng shi, or ‘making an empty show of strength’. For a great deal of Lijiang’s success, I will argue, can be attributed not to any actual place-based characteristics of the town itself but rather to the media’s ability to dislodge place brands from actual places, turning them into loose signifiers with ambiguous but highly malleable content.
