Performing Authenticity for the Chinese Gaze: Multimodal Strategies in Spanish Institutional Tourism Videos

As Western institutions increasingly target Chinese audiences, they face the significant challenge of communicating abstract cultural values across different semiotic and affective repertoires. Authenticity, a cornerstone of cultural promotion, is particularly difficult to translate. This study examines how this challenge is addressed in practice, asking: what multimodal strategies do institutions use to construct and mediate authenticity for the Chinese market? The study analyzes a corpus of 20 promotional videos released by Spanish public institutions for Chinese digital platforms. Drawing on visual grammar —critically adapted to account for temporality, camera movement, and multimodal orchestration—fine-grained annotation of four representative videos is combined with a macro-level corpus analysis to identify recurring semiotic patterns. The findings reveal that authenticity is not an inherent quality but is systematically produced through multimodal configurations that foreground emotional narration, idealized modality, and culturally adapted forms of viewer positioning. Four recurrent strategies are identified— “real participation”, “scenic contemplation”, “emotional narration”, and “sensory engagement”—each mobilizing specific combinations of gaze, social distance, framing, narrative structure, and auditory co-deployment to naturalize particular versions of “genuine” experience for a Chinese audience. The study further demonstrates how institutional audiovisual discourse selectively foregrounds desirable cultural meanings while marginalizing less marketable realities, a dynamic theorized here as reverse strategic orientalism. Theoretically, this research proposes a methodologically grounded model for understanding how abstract cultural values are operationalized in audiovisual communication. Practically, it provides a typology of multimodal strategies that can inform the work of intercultural communication professionals.