Tourism Development on China’s Northwestern Border: Territorialisation, Reterritorialisation, and Geopolitics of the Great Altai Region in Inner Asia

This study analyses tourism development in the Great Altai Region (GAR), both within and outside Chinese borders, to explore how the Chinese party-state uses tourism development as a strategy to simultaneously territorialise an ethnic minority border region and reterritorialise the entire GAR. This spatial reconfiguration aims to align the regional geopolitics and geo-economics with the Belt and Road Initiative. Document collection and participant observation methods were used to gather data. The findings show that the party-state enhances its control over the border and ethnic minorities in the Kanas Tourist Attraction area by developing eco-tourism, intersecting territoriality, tourism, and ecologism. Concurrently, cross-border tourism has been promoted in the GAR to reterritorialise the region, both materially and discursively, in favour of China’s spatial vision. Although territorialisation of the Chinese borderland helps the party-state manage the reterritorialisation processes in the GAR, it also creates a securitisation-integration dilemma, arising from conflicts between the Chinese national territorial logic and GAR territorial logic.