How New Consumption Scenarios Cultivate the Civilizational Experience Economy: Evidence from Jimei District, Xiamen

Abstract

Research on the deep integration of culture, tourism, sports and commerce must answer not only why integration fails, but also why it succeeds. Taking Jimei District of Xiamen as a critical case, and drawing on policy documents, official statistics and in-depth interviews with 12 scenario stakeholders, this study adopts a qualitative design of theoretical sampling combined with comparable-case and internal-variation contrasts. It asks a simple question: how could an island suburban district with medium endowments cultivate the Jiageng Spirit written in textbooks into a civilizational experience that can be participated in, consumed and identified with? The findings show that Jimei’s success lies not in resource abundance but in a set of mutually embedded, circularly reinforcing cultivation mechanisms. Symbolic translation makes culture perceptible, bodily entry makes experience credible, and identity sedimentation makes consumption sustainable, while identity in turn lengthens the life cycle of consumption and enhances its local conversion. New consumption scenarios thus become micro-sites of the civilizational experience economy, which is defined as an economic form in which Chinese civilization serves as the carrier and civilizational identity is constructed through consumption. The paper further proposes three groups of observable criteria for distinguishing cultivation from fabrication and conducts a directional test against the case materials, offering lessons for similar urban new districts and providing local governments with an accountable analytical tool for evaluating the effectiveness of integration.