建构田园牧歌：旅游发展背景下的地方推广与乡村消费研究

Place promotion plays an important role in enhancing the attractiveness and competitiveness of a place. The existing studies, however, have focused on the field of urban areas and small towns, and relatively little attention has been paid to the rural areas, especially in promoting the rural nature rather than the historical and cultural heritage. In addition, limited scholarship has investigated the evaluation of place promotion, increasingly making a call to examine the circuit of production and consumption of place image in the actions of place promotion. Taking Xixinan village in Huangshan city, China as a case study, this paper thus comprehensively uses qualitative methods to analyze the construction and communication of place image in such a rural tourism destination, as well as tourists' perception, consumption and feedback of the projected place image. It is found that the local government, centered on the natural landscape of the maple poplar forest, takes advantage of the local ecological environment to construct the image of the 'Wizard of Oz' and actively promote it, marketing it as a romantic place myth. Essentially, the place image of 'The Wizard of Oz' is a version of rural idyll, in which such seductive place promotion caters to people's escape from urban modernity, as well as nostalgia for the countryside. Through the analysis of embodied consumption, it is further found that tourists' consumption behavior and feelings are in line with the setting of rural idyll constructed by the local government, and they show corresponding nuanced characteristics in physical sense, cognition and emotion. Meanwhile, it is also argued that it is not limited to the scope of the previous discourse of place promotion. Tourists' embodied experience reveals their positivity and agency, making sense in the construction of their subjective meaning and the consumption of place. Under the premise of successful place promotion, tourists' rural consumption behavior is able to be fed back to the next round of tourism production, further shaping the rurality of the 'Wizard of Oz' in Xixinan village. By doing so, the consumption of tourists reinforces the representation of the previously established tourist landscape discourse. This paper contributes to the academic debate of 'clarifying the conceptual confusion between place promotion and place marketing and advancing relevant empirical research'. Further, it advances the empirical research agenda of 'circuits of tourism' proposed by Irena Ateljevic by placing the geographical process of this framework in a rural context, and discussing the production and consumption of tourism on the rurality. In practice, this paper provides planning guidance for rural tourism marketing and tourism experience creation.