Everyday Resistance in Leisure Spaces: Tourism Practices and Media Use among China's Middle Class

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Abigail Qian Zhou  

This study investigates how domestic tourism practices and media engagement among China’s middle class during the Spring Festival reflect forms of everyday resistance and expressions of social agency within specific sociocultural contexts. Using a self-designed quantitative survey conducted over the holiday period, the research examines statistical correlations between objective indicators of middle-class status (e.g., occupation, education, income), behavioral variables (e.g., tourism patterns, media use), and subjective cognitive indicators such as political consciousness. It also explores potential causal relationships among these factors. To enhance interpretive depth, qualitative observations and semi-structured interviews were conducted during the Spring Festival, focusing on how participants engage—through social media, video platforms, and user interactions—with perspectives and historical narratives diverging from dominant and mainstream discourse. These engagements often give rise to critical reflection and symbolic responses.The Spring Festival, as a highly institutionalized temporal setting, serves both as a space for the performative display of collective cultural imagination and as a key opportunity for the middle class to construct social meaning and articulate identity through leisure and media. Using “everyday resistance in leisure spaces” as an analytical lens, this study highlights the strategies by which China’s middle class negotiates identity, self-adjustment, and meaning through tourism and media. It further reveals the civic and value-forming potential embedded in these practices. By situating middle-class tourism and media use within the specific context of the Spring Festival, the study contributes to a nuanced understanding of leisure spaces as sites of negotiation, contestation, and identity formation in contemporary Chinese society.