How Revolutionary Heritage Trips Turn Visitors Into Storytellers

Every year, millions of visitors walk through China’s revolutionary heritage sites, standing where pivotal moments of national history unfolded. Many of them leave not only with photographs but with something less tangible: a reconstructed understanding of the past that they feel compelled to share. A new study published in Current Psychology offers one of the most detailed accounts yet of how that transformation happens, tracing the psychological pathway that leads from an on-site experience to the intention to tell others about it. The research, conducted by Shaohua Yang of Anhui University of Technology and Putian University and Juan Yang of Sichuan Tourism University, suggests that the memory a visitor forms of revolutionary history, and the sense of well-being that memory produces, may be the critical links between what tourists encounter and what they later communicate.

The study focuses on what researchers call red tourism, travel to sites associated with revolutionary history and the founding narratives of the People’s Republic of China. This form of heritage travel has grown into a major segment of the domestic Chinese tourism market, encompassing memorial halls, former battlefields, and locations tied to the early history of the Communist Party. Unlike conventional sightseeing, red tourism carries an explicit historical and ideological payload, which makes it a natural laboratory for studying how experiences become memories and how memories become stories. The authors argue that red memory, defined as a visitor’s reconstructed understanding and remembrance of revolutionary history, has been under-theorized in the tourism literature, and their study sets out to place it at the center of the explanatory chain.

To build their model, the researchers drew on a classic framework in psychology known as Cognition–Affect–Conation, or C–A–C. This framework, with roots stretching back to early work on the trilogy of mind, proposes that human responses unfold in three stages: people first perceive and interpret a stimulus, then react to it emotionally, and finally form intentions or take action. Applied to tourism, the framework suggests that the experiences a visitor has at a site shape what they remember, those memories shape how they feel about their lives, and those feelings shape whether they intend to share the story. The study tests each of these links empirically, treating red memory as a context-specific cognitive construct rather than a generic travel recollection.

The empirical setting was Nanhu Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, a site of singular importance in Chinese revolutionary history as the location where the First National Congress of the Communist Party concluded aboard a boat on the lake. The researchers collected survey responses from 597 visitors who had toured the site, a sample that spanned a broad demographic range: just over half were male, roughly a third were between 25 and 34 years old, and nearly three-quarters had visited red tourism destinations at least twice before. The questionnaire measured four dimensions of the tourism experience, along with red memory, subjective well-being, and storytelling intention, using established scales adapted from prior research and translated with careful attention to cross-language validity.

The four experience dimensions capture distinct psychological levers. Sensory experience refers to the degree to which a visit makes a strong impression on the senses, from striking visuals to the atmosphere of a place. Authentic experience measures whether visitors perceive the site as genuinely preserving original revolutionary culture, local traditions, and the natural ecology of the area. Co-creation experience reflects the visitor’s active participation in shaping the visit through interaction with service staff, a concept drawn from the service marketing literature on value co-creation. Novelty experience, finally, captures the feeling of being transported to another time and place, of escaping the trajectory of daily life. Each of these dimensions has been studied in isolation in prior tourism research, but the study treats them as parallel inputs into a single memory-forming process.

On the analytical side, the study combined two complementary statistical approaches. The first, partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, is a technique for estimating networks of relationships among measured variables, well suited to testing whether the hypothesized chain from experience to memory to well-being to storytelling holds across the sample. The second, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, or fsQCA, takes a fundamentally different view. Rather than asking whether each variable has an average effect across all cases, fsQCA asks which combinations of conditions are sufficient to produce an outcome in particular cases, recognizing that different visitors may reach the same destination by different routes. Using both methods on the same dataset allowed the researchers to report both net associations and configurational pathways.

The PLS-SEM results supported the full theoretical chain. Sensory, authentic, co-creation, and novelty experiences were each positively associated with red memory, meaning that visitors who reported stronger impressions on any of these dimensions also reported deeper reconstructed understanding of revolutionary history. Red memory, in turn, was positively associated with subjective well-being, suggesting that engaging with a meaningful historical narrative contributes to visitors’ sense of happiness and life satisfaction. Finally, subjective well-being was positively associated with storytelling intention, the self-reported likelihood of posting photographs online, telling others about the trip, and sharing the story with friends and relatives. The measurement model passed standard checks for reliability and discriminant validity, and the researchers assessed common method bias using established diagnostic procedures.

The fsQCA analysis added a layer of nuance that a single-path model cannot capture. It identified two distinct configurations of experience dimensions that were sufficient for high storytelling intention. The first combined strong sensory experiences with strong novelty experiences, a pairing that suggests visitors who are vividly stimulated and feel transported out of their everyday lives are primed to share. The second combined authentic, co-creation, and novel experiences, indicating an alternative route in which perceived genuineness, active participation, and a sense of escape jointly drive the impulse to tell the story. Notably, no single experience dimension was by itself sufficient, underscoring the configurational logic that multiple ingredients must converge. These two pathways are described as alternative rather than mutually exclusive, and they complement the average effects estimated by the structural model.

The theoretical significance of the work lies in how it positions red memory. Much of the tourism literature treats memorable experiences as generic, but this study argues that memory formed at ideologically and historically charged sites is context-specific, shaped by the content of the history itself rather than merely by the pleasure of the visit. The finding that such memory feeds into subjective well-being connects red tourism to a broader research stream linking travel to happiness, including cross-lagged panel studies showing that tourism experiences predict later well-being. It also aligns with prior evidence that recollection and storytelling mediate between tourism experiences and well-being outcomes, and with work showing that historical storytelling can deepen value co-creation among heritage tourists.

For site managers and destination planners, the practical implications are concrete. The two sufficient configurations point to design priorities: experiences that stimulate the senses while creating a feeling of novelty, and experiences that combine authenticity with opportunities for visitors to participate actively. The prominence of co-creation in the second pathway suggests that interactive engagement with guides and staff is not a peripheral service feature but a core ingredient in whether visitors leave as storytellers. Because tourist-generated storytelling operates through both interpersonal channels and social media, the reach of a single visit can extend far beyond the site itself, transmitting historical and cultural meanings to audiences who never set foot there. The authors note that the dataset is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, and the study received ethical approval and informed consent from all participants, with funding from provincial and national research foundations in China.

Subject of Research: The psychological pathway from red tourism experiences through red memory and subjective well-being to storytelling intention

Article Title: From red tourism experiences to storytelling intention: the roles of red memory and subjective well-being

Article References: Yang, S., & Yang, J. (2026). From red tourism experiences to storytelling intention: the roles of red memory and subjective well-being. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1585. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10157-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10157-x

Keywords: red tourism, red memory, subjective well-being, storytelling intention, tourist experience, PLS-SEM, fsQCA, heritage tourism, Cognition-Affect-Conation framework, Nanhu Lake, co-creation, novelty