Digital Gaze and Cultural Representation. A Sentiment Analysis of User-Generated Content for Tourism in Chinese Ethnic Villages

With the rise of mobile social platforms, tourists have become active representers of ethnic cultures, and the user-generated content (UGC) they post on platforms such as Xiaohongshu has profoundly reshaped the ways in which cultural images of ethnic villages are constructed; however, existing research has paid insufficient attention to how digital gaze mediates cultural representations and how they compare with each other across different types of destinations. In this study, a total of 5,487 Xiaohongshu UGC texts were collected during the period of 2022-2024 using Guizhou Xijiang Thousand Households Miaozhai, Yunnan Yuanyang Hani Terraces, and Guangxi Longsheng Ping'an Zhuangzhai as case studies. This study not only expands the boundaries of the application of tourism gaze theory in digital media contexts, but also provides empirical evidence for the sustainable governance of ethnic and cultural tourism and platform representation ethics.