Journeys of the nation: Investigating the use of flags in Chinese travel

National flags are an essential ingredient in the nationalist playbook, being used to pledge allegiance, to commemorate holidays, to serve as staging for speeches, to drape coffins, to represent sports teams, to sell merchandise, to identify ships and other vehicles, and to be desecrated as sign of resistance. Yet most thinking around flags considers them rather stationary and attached to particular places or events. Few studies have considered how flags circulate spatially, e.g., the factors that influence carrying flags while traveling. Moreover, few studies provide systematic understandings of flagways across social groups and different situations by using large-n datasets.

Chinese tourists in particular have begun utilising national flags in travel. On the social media platform Little Red Book, a hashtag has appeared entitled “Taking the Chinese Flag on Tour”, which has over 44 million page views. Given the rise of China as a regional and global power, it is timely to investigate how the application of China’s national symbols is connected to changes in its social, economic, political and geopolitical situation.

This study uses online social media posted by mainland Chinese to study the situational nature of flagways. It uses qualitative analysis of 1000 social media posts from Little Red Book (under hashtag “Taking the National Flag on Tour”) to understand how flags are deployed while traveling and how official meanings interact with vernacular micro rituals of flag-waving. Then it introduces an innovative methodological approach to studying national symbols by using a systematic sampling of flags through visual content analysis of images from the travel website Mafengwo, scraping a total of 100,000
travelogues per year. This allows the accomplishment of something akin to a “census of flags”.

By harnessing machine learning tools, we use image captures to measure flag prevalence and geographic distribution. We use this data to answer the following questions: (a) How have official flagways changed over time in recent Chinese history and to what new situations and spaces have they been applied? (b) Among what type of material spaces, regions, infrastructures, and people are Chinese travelers more likely to engage with flags? (c) What types of reactions do Chinese travelers have when encountering flags? (d) How do domestic contexts differ from foreign contexts with respect to flag reactions? (f) What influences do demographic factors like age and gender have on flagways?