This study presents a historical examination of China's frontier tourism. It applies discourse analysis through fieldwork and travelogues to find two discourses in Xishuangbanna: travel (1950–1983) and tourism (1984–2024). In the travel discourse, literary workers who have a vast and holistic experience with travel integrate the frontier into their utopian image of the nation-state with a metanarrative by way of print capitalism. In the tourism discourse, tourists who have had a personal hedonic experience of non-daily time and space construct the frontier into a paradise with customized narratives using digital media. Tourism discourse absorbs, deconstructs, and reconstructs travel discourse. The frontier exists in the tension between travel and tourism discourses, which together construct the image of the frontier destination.
Sun et al. (Mon,) studied this question.