‘He Wei Gui’: The wisdom and action of tourism photography vendors to handle conflicts in Canton Tower Scenic Area

Abstract

Given both the popularity of street vendors and the government resistance to them in tourism governance, we interview vendors between September 2014 and May 2021 to gain insights into the interactions and conflicts between vendors, local enterprises and government departments in Canton, China. We derive a theory of ‘He Wei Gui’ from Chinese Confucian culture and adopt discourse analysis to investigate how informal tourism photography vendors in the Canton Tower Scenic Area resolve their conflicts. We argue that photography vendors have developed a harmonious but fragile coexistence through the use of measures such as fuzzification of public space, flexible industry regulations, output of emotional capital and normalised ways, thereby demonstrating the business acumen of little people. In contrast to the existing trend of ‘rigid governance’, the authors suggest applying ‘flexible management’ in the informal economy and tourism governance, and giving prominence to the principal role of informal operators or little people. In addition, this flexible management reflects the tacit consent from all the stakeholders, the active suing for nonviolent solution from the vulnerable and the willingness of modifying or even creating rules for balancing the distribution of the interests from the dominant stakeholder. The key to this flexible management is that authorities take the investment of emotional capital of the vulnerable groups into consideration. This leads to fuzzy governance which blurs and integrates emotions into the rules, making it possible to solve the conflicts in a more flexible way.

Editors-in-Chief Notes, June issue, 2023

“…As outlined in the 23(1) issue our aims in Tourist Studies to “build back better” in post-pandemic times and the restarting of travel include supporting critical Asian tourism studies “as a means to rectify Anglo-western centrism and to bring about new approaches, methodologies and theories that will help us better understand Asian societies and their tourism” (Ong and Frohlick, 2023: 4). In this way, the Chinese concept of he wei gui featured in the article by Guo, Q et al (2023) as an analytical framework to theorize the co-existence of photography street vendors at conflict with one another in Guangzhou City, China offers a significant contribution. Integrating he wei gui —translated as “harmony is the most precious”—into their analysis of tourism governance, the authors deftly maintain a dialog across internationally recognized theories and concepts while carefully outlining “a locally and regionally derived conceptualization” (Ong and Frohlick, 2023: 5).…”