Tourism and Entrepreneurialism in Southeast Asian Cities

Abstract

This study reviews recent literatures related to entrepreneurship in the Southeast Asian urban tourism sector. The study is divided into three sections. The first section concerns urban identity. I outline recent debates surrounding the disparity between tourist stereotypes of the region’s cities and discursive attempts by the local governments to counter them. I argue that the twin themes of harmony and convergence are used by Southeast Asia’s urban governments to promote their cities as appealing, safe, and multicultural places to visit. In the second section, I present an alternative approach to traditional understandings of state–society relations in the region. Instead of explaining local resistances to a predatory state, I highlight recent research that favors a relational, cooperative reading of the production of the tourism industry in Southeast Asia. Lastly, I introduce the political implications for urban tourism growth, focusing on the desires of the Southeast Asian urban population to use tourism as a tool to expedite their political goals.

Seeing Red Over Green: Contesting Urban Sustainabilities in China

“…While the emergence of the ‘entrepreneurial city’ has often been cited as a common trend in many late capitalist societies, its nature and shape are contingent upon varying local factors and conditions such as different national regulation systems and local political cultures. This is hardly surprising as not all urban developmental strategies subscribe to the same entrepreneurial logic as that which emerged in the ‘West’ and entrepreneurial/neoliberal urbanism has unfolded in a highly uneven manner across time and space (see for example, Shen and Wu, 2012; Gillen, 2010; Pow, 2002). In fact, as Jonas and While (2007, p. 127) point out, researchers are now discovering that not all cities are ‘entrepreneurial’—at least not in the narrow sense—and that many so-called entrepreneurial cities are indeed engaged in various environmental and social improvements.…”

Urban Entrepreneurialism, Cultural Economy, and Tourism

“…In 1986, the Vietnamese state formally launched an open door policy in order to reform its socialist economic system and get integrated into the global economy. This policy, as Gillen (2016) notes, is fraught with conflicts, struggles, and compromise among the central government in Hanoi, local authorities in Ho Chi Minh City, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and private investors. With a focus on tourism development in Ho Chi Minh City, Gillen’s book is a timely contribution to our understanding of how urban entrepreneurialism plays out in a transitional economy.…”

“…In order to cater to different tourism markets, sites related to the ‘Vietnam’ War or the ‘American’ War are carefully crafted to sell painful past memories in the marketplace. The key challenge is to reshape the meanings of war landscapes from hatred and affliction to ‘sympathy, empathy, and commiseration’ (Gillen, 2016: 79). Like other cases of urban tourism development (Gotham, 2005; Su and Teo, 2009), war-related memory sites in Ho Chi Minh City are engineered into unique tourist products to enhance the city’s attractiveness in the tourism industry.…”

“…The juxtaposition of open market and cultural patriotism does not only appear in Vietnam but also becomes a key national policy to maintain social stability and political security in many East Asian countries, as shown in the case of music industry in Singapore (Kong, 1997), red tourism in China (Zhao and Timothy, 2015), and intelligent landscapes in Malaysia (Bunnell, 2004). Here, we are given an important geographical account of neoliberalism with Asian characteristics, as political elites refuse to submit to ‘the inevitability of neolibralization’ (Gillen, 2016: 49). Indeed, Vietnam’s engagement with the global economy via tourism and other sectors, as similarly in the case of China, exemplifies ‘how to reap the benefits of the global market-place whilst maintaining strong defenses against the dangers of [neoliberal] globalization’ (Breslin, 2004: 16).…”