Abstract
The ‘East meets West’ concept has been widely used by tourism promotion agencies and destination management organizations engaged in marketing postcolonial tourism destinations in Asia. However, the decolonized identity-making process behind this tourism promotion concept is neglected in the literature. This paper explores the identity-making behind the ‘East meets West’ tourism promotion of the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions of China. Through critical discourse analysis of tourism promotional texts and in-depth interviews with tourism and cultural experts, the findings reveal that, although tourism has been used effectively as a tool to decolonize Hong Kong and Macau and reposition them as Chinese cities, power struggles influence the repositioning of the two cities as ‘East meets West’, with very distinct impacts on the cities' identities and tourism promotion. Tourism management implications are outlined for both destinations as well as future research avenues related to the study findings and limitations.