Politics as a Vacation: Tourist Practices and the Building of the Nation-State.

This article examines how domestic tourism in China functions as a micro-practice that legitimizes and naturalizes the nation-state's material, symbolic, and territorial projects. Through qualitative content analysis of 90 online travel diaries from 2006 to 2019, it identifies four key ways tourists engage with the nation-state: geographic and territorial experiences, historical reenactments, ethno-cultural encounters, and perceptions of a common modernizing mission. The study finds that tourist practices embody and reinforce state narratives about territory, history, ethnic diversity, and development, while also revealing occasional localized resistances to state regulations. By focusing on embodied mobility rather than state-led programs, the research contributes to political sociology by highlighting how everyday leisure activities like tourism shape citizens' experiential understanding of the nation-state.