This study explores the construction of “tourist gaze” by examining Taiwan’s tourism policies from the 1950s to the present day. It identifies four distinctive stages through which discourses of tourism policy has shifted from the paradigm of nation building to that of nation branding. The constructed gazing has also changed from “Chineseness” to “Taiwanness.” This study showed that tourism is an ideological state apparatus that materializes banal nationalism. The trend towards nation branding seems to undermine the rhetoric of nation building, as the logic of economic competitiveness replaces the importance of nationalism. However, the attempt to construct Taiwan as an object of tourist gaze in light of globalization, paradoxically, helps construct Taiwan as a new nation and realize its cultural subjectivity. Tourism thus also participates in Taiwan’s cultural Taiwanization.