‘He Wei Gui’: The wisdom and action of tourism photography vendors to handle conflicts in Canton Tower Scenic Area

Abstract

Given both the popularity of street vendors and the government resistance to them in tourism governance, we interview vendors between September 2014 and May 2021 to gain insights into the interactions and conflicts between vendors, local enterprises and government departments in Canton, China. We derive a theory of ‘He Wei Gui’ from Chinese Confucian culture and adopt discourse analysis to investigate how informal tourism photography vendors in the Canton Tower Scenic Area resolve their conflicts. We argue that photography vendors have developed a harmonious but fragile coexistence through the use of measures such as fuzzification of public space, flexible industry regulations, output of emotional capital and normalised ways, thereby demonstrating the business acumen of little people. In contrast to the existing trend of ‘rigid governance’, the authors suggest applying ‘flexible management’ in the informal economy and tourism governance, and giving prominence to the principal role of informal operators or little people. In addition, this flexible management reflects the tacit consent from all the stakeholders, the active suing for nonviolent solution from the vulnerable and the willingness of modifying or even creating rules for balancing the distribution of the interests from the dominant stakeholder. The key to this flexible management is that authorities take the investment of emotional capital of the vulnerable groups into consideration. This leads to fuzzy governance which blurs and integrates emotions into the rules, making it possible to solve the conflicts in a more flexible way.