ABSTRACT
This special issue publishes research on tourism to (and from) China and its associated policy, development, and business practices from cross-cultural communication and cultural studies perspectives. Theoretically, the (re)presentation and interpretation of culture are often characteristic of an incommensurability and at times contradictions in ideology and values, which often result in discourse that does not share cultural and rhetorical traditions. Liu (1999), in argumentation studies, alluded to such cross-cultural, typically East–West, interlocutions as the justification of one’s position in another’s terms, in which he observed “non-Western interlocutors in general are willing to debate cross-cultural issues in Western terms, whereas Western interlocutors are also increasingly seeking to justify their positions in non-Western terms” (p. 297). Contextually it is within the same complexity that this special issue on “China watching” is conceived.
