Booking Engines as Battlefields

Contesting Technology, Travel, and Territory in Taiwan and China

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3948360
AutoresIan Rowen (0000-0002-9674-5669, Nanyang Technological University, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume28
Fascículo4
Páginas1489-1505
Data de publicação2023-08-08
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2022.2027914
OpenAlexW4210687511
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas7
Referências citadas45

Travel booking engines can produce, resist, and destabilise popular and state-directed geopolitical representations of a world neatly divided into national and international space. Although they present as strictly functional technical platforms, booking engines obscure and omit what is contingent and contested in the production of a destination as a bordered national territory. Due to their embedding in the webs of political representation, these systems and their backers can become targets for economic boycotts, political threats, hacks, or other interventions when territorial designations are contested. Such interventions manifest as political performances aimed at multiple audiences, including tourists and travellers, as well as the businesses and political entities that facilitate or inhibit their circulation, with spillover effects into other domains of geopolitical representation. To empirically illustrate this argument, the paper analyzes the People’s Republic of China’s mostly successful efforts to coerce the international travel industry to relist destinations within Taiwan as belonging to China. By extending the notion of border performativity into the ‘code/spaces’ that span the online and offline worlds, it concludes that booking engines, like other forms of infrastructure that serve travellers and tourists, can produce popular geopolitical effects that exceed their own technical systems. Peering through these ruptures reveals the uneasy and unstable assemblages of travel infrastructure and territorial representation that regulate global mobility

China · Destinations · Economics · Economy · Geopolitics · Peering · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Internet · Tourism · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Law