Narrative Construction, Audience Engagement, and Communication Dilemmas of Bazhong Red Cultural Tourism on Short-video Platforms

Abstract

Short-video platforms have become a major channel for disseminating red cultural tourism and revolutionary heritage to new audiences in China’s old revolutionary base areas. Bazhong, in the former Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet area, boasts abundant red heritage sites, yet few empirical studies examine how short-video narratives shape audience responses. Drawing on media narrative theory and audience engagement theory, this study uses semi-structured interviews, content analysis, and structural equation modeling (SEM). It explores how narrative construction shapes audience engagement with Bazhong red tourism short videos and identifies their communication challenges. Interviews with 20 practitioners, creators, residents and tourists, alongside coding of 200 popular Douyin videos, yielded three narrative construction dimensions: narrative content, narrative form, and emotional narrative. SEM analysis via analysis of moment structures (AMOS) was conducted using 326 valid questionnaire responses. All three dimensions were positively associated with cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement, and emotional narrative showed the strongest association (overall standardized path coefficient=0.628). Content coding further revealed the characteristics of the sample videos. A total of 68.5% of sampled videos merely featured check-in footage of revolutionary sites. In-depth storytelling accounted for only 12.0%. These findings demonstrate several problems: homogeneous content, shallow emotional expression, insufficient youth-oriented discourse, and weak feedback loops. The findings situate the narrative-engagement relationship in a localized red tourism setting and suggest that producers prioritize emotional storytelling, differentiated local content, and two-way audience interaction.