How do states achieve foreign policy goals using economic means? This project seeks to understand the question by bringing in the lens of state-led mobilization. This project argues that to achieve diplomatic goals (e.g, changing political behavior of overseas governments), China’s party-state would mobilize myriad domestic actors to partake in the economic retribution for counteracting international pressure. Examining the Sino-Korea dispute over the THAAD deployment and the cross-strait tensions with Taiwan, this project focuses on the party-state’s use of outbound tourism in dealing with such conflicts. Through the lens of a “hard plus soft” dual mobilization paradigm that combines mobilization by decree and mobilization by persuasion, this project argues that the Chinese government endeavors to rally a wide range of domestic forces, including commercial and social actors to counteract foreign pressure. On the one hand, the government establishes intermediary economic actors, such as travel agencies, to help execute state directives by requiring citizens to abide by “hard”, coercive state rules. It orders travel agencies, which are well-supervised by the state, to help the government implement formal or informal tourism bans in which ordinary tourists would find themselves unable to make desired trips. On the other hand, the state carries out “soft mobilization” through media persuasion to bring citizens into spontaneous compliance such that the prospective tourists are unwilling to insist on the trips. Through computer-aided content analysis and critical discourse analysis, this project finds the party not only primes domestic audience of the political it has been promoted, but engage in strategic framings to accommodate national interest as well as ordinary citizens’ everyday interest. Experimental and real-world investigations of the effectiveness of such dual mobilization paradigm also demonstrate that both the hard and soft mobilization tactics can largely prevent domestic actors from traveling to rival regions, an outcome the Chinese government desires to penalize diplomatic foes. However, the findings also suggest that both the hard and soft forms of mobilization should be assessed from specific temporal and spatial contexts, the variation of which tends to largely influence how the state reaches its goals.
