Chinese Travel Blogs in English : A Cross-Cultural Discursive Perspective

Among the cohorts of China’s netizens are there travel bloggers that write in English? If so, who are they, what do they write about and how? In order to provide a snapshot of this in-between discursive space, a digital ethnographic approach was adopted to circumscribe a data set of four English-language travel blogs about China, written by Chinese authors, or at least bilingual and bicultural ones, for an audience of international tourists. Consisting of 186 posts from 2010 to 2016, the textual selection was then queried by means of the Leximancer software tool to retrieve the main themes and concepts across the data set and their mutual semantic connections. Text-mining results were finally subjected to a discourse-analytic overview, aiming to illustrate a few pivotal points in the representation of China by social actors that are purportedly insiders of Chinese culture, though with varying degrees of engagement: to Western tourists’ surprise, the emerging representation of the country defies preconceived cultural scripts.