Gendered guanxi and rural tourism entrepreneurship

Abstract

This study develops a theory of gendered guanxi to explain how rural women entrepreneurs navigate and transform tourism development in China. Drawing on qualitative research in Zhuyi Village, a state-supported Model Village in China, we trace how women strategically do and redo gender across familial, internal, and external guanxi domains to negotiate legitimacy, access resources, and exercise authority. Our analysis conceptualises gendered guanxi as a relational process through which women reproduce and recalibrate gendered expectations. The findings show how empowerment emerges through economic achievement, relational legitimacy, and gendered authority, while remaining constrained by continuing obligations. Gendered guanxi shows how these changes travel across relational domains, advancing feminist entrepreneurship theory by explaining how entrepreneurship simultaneously reproduces and recalibrates gendered structures of agency.