Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China

This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of place as it relates to globalization and mobility by examining the sociolinguistic construction of a tourism site. A former residential neighborhood, West Street in Yangshuo County, China, was gradually transformed into a so-called ‘global village’ for domestic tourists partly through appropriating English as one semiotic resource. Positioning this place in the global-national-local nexus, this study shows that the promotion of West Street as a ‘global village’ is not only driven by globalization or westernization, but more importantly capitalizes on English as a stylistic resource that indexes the modernist aspirations of the Chinese people. This commodified sense of place is nevertheless negotiated by tourists as they activate and (re-)work the social meaning of place through their discursive practices. This highlights how place is a social construct, constantly transformed in the process of socio-historical change, and also mediated by people's conceptualization, imagination and experience.