China’s disaster memorialisation industry: How commodification of trauma undermines resilience-building and obscures systemic risk governance
Original framing: “Is China’s ‘dark tourism’ turning disaster education into entertainment?” — Al Jazeera
The voices of marginalised groups—particularly survivors of disasters and local communities—are systematically excluded from narratives around dark tourism. In China, survivors of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake or the 2020 Beijing floods have often been sidelined in favour of state-approved narratives that frame disasters as natural events rather than outcomes of poor urban planning or environmental degradation. Globally, marginalised communities have resisted commodification of their trauma, such as the survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake who rejected tourism projects that repurposed their suffering. These voices reveal that dark tourism is not a neutral cultural practice but a mechanism of power that erases the agency of those most affected. Centring marginalised perspectives would shift the debate from ethics to justice, asking who benefits from these sites and who is left behind.
China’s dark tourism phenomenon is not an isolated cultural quirk but a symptom of deeper systemic failures in disaster governance, where state and corporate actors prioritise economic extraction over genuine resilience.
The commodification of disaster sites mirrors global patterns of trauma commodification, from post-WWII European battlefields to post-tsunami Thai beaches, revealing how power structures—whether state-led or market-driven—shape memorialisation to serve their interests. Historical precedents and marginalised voices, such as those of Sichuan earthquake survivors, demonstrate that these practices are not neutral but actively erode community agency and divert attention from the systemic vulnerabilities that enable disasters. Cross-culturally, Indigenous and spiritual approaches to trauma—like Māori *whakapapa* or Japanese *ohara*—offer alternatives that centre healing and collective responsibility, contrasting sharply with China’s state-driven model. Future modelling warns that unchecked dark tourism will exacerbate risks by normalising disaster as spectacle, while scientific evidence underscores its role in undermining long-term resilience. The trickster perspective further exposes the hypocrisy of memorialising trauma for profit while ignoring the real-world drivers of disaster. Together, these dimensions reveal that the solution lies not in condemning dark tourism but in dismantling the power structures that enable it—through community-led memorialisation, ethical regulation, and the integration of Indigenous knowledge into disaster governance.