Recent trends in China’s domestic tourism development offer possibilities for the democratisation of the ways that places and people are represented and understood. This study offers a timely intervention for understanding the change in China’s ideologically charged tourism representations as affected by the growth of domestic travel. The central topics are the creation and production of places of tourism in two ethnic minority rural villages. The analysis on the promotional outputs of both villages across various media defines tourism as a discourse of difference and indicates that tourism is utilised by the Chinese government as an ideological tool to locate and define minority ethnicity. The study aims to determine how China’s ethnic places are produced and their effect on the social and institutional relations in a contemporary nation that is stratified upon rural and ethnic binaries of difference.