A return to innocence: Guimi tourism and women empowerment

Influenced by the Confucian culture, clan-family structure, and communist ideology, gender inequality still widely exists in modern China. On reflection of the socio-cultural framework that shaped the Chinese gender lens, this study took a “power to” perspective on women empowerment by investigating 28 Guimi-tourists' embodied experience. Upon identifying the core experience of “Return to Innocence,” a resources-agency-achievements framework was constructed to depict the underlying mechanism through which Guimi tourism empowered women to counteract sociocultural constraints. The study offered a context-specific understanding of Guimi tourism and theoretically contributed to women empowerment and tourism, as well as Chinese cultural studies.