Antarctic ambassadorship in the Sino-Anthropocene: connecting tourism affect and more-than-human landscapes

This article critically examines the rapid growth of Antarctic tourism through a more-than-human lens, with a focus on Chinese tourists’ transformative Antarctic ambassadorship. We argue that prevailing tourism narratives—which depict the Antarctic as a spectacular wilderness devoid of human environmental impact—are inadequate, particularly in the context of the Sino-Anthropo-cene. Drawing on a netnographic analysis of Chinese social media (RedNotes) and an embodied, affect-focused reading of Antarctic ambassador Wan Yunfeng’s more-than-human tourism archive, we examine these ambassadors’ affective engagements with Antarctic landscapes, focusing on their more-than-human contacts and relational entanglements. Specifically, we identify the tension between spectacle-driven narratives and emerging affective practices of embodiment that enact more-than-human entanglements in the Antarctic. While spectacle-based ambassadorship arises public affective resonance with Antarctic environment and wildlife, it often fails to cultivate sustained engagement with humans’ relational care and responsibilities to nonhuman animals and environments. Thus, our research proposes an ambassadorship of affective entanglement that redefines tourist role as situated within, rather than above, the polar more-than-human landscapes in the Anthropocene.