Covering a wide range of current issues, this comprehensive Handbook explores the links between tourism as a dynamic tertiary industry and China as the world’s most influential tourism market and destination.

Examine China's impact on the world tourism market! Tourism in China is a comprehensive study of tourism and the travel industry in China--past, present, and future. Since joining many of its Asia-Pacific neighbors in identifying tourism as a vehicle for socioeconomic growth and poverty alleviation, China has become the leader in the Asian travel industry, surpassing all forecasts with high and constant growth in international and domestic tourism activity. In fact, the World Trade Organization predicts that by 2020, China will become the world's leading tourism destination, receiving 145 million visitors. This timely book examines the diverse opportunities and challenges the country's tourism industry faces in meeting those projections. A unique, interdisciplinary guide that appeals to practitioners and academics, Tourism in China has been called “probably the most in-depth analysis of China's tourism industry” by the World Trade Organization's Dr. Harsh Varma. The book presents a collection of articles--scholarly in nature, comprehensive in scope--that serves as a significant (and much-needed) reference on Chinese tourism, though not including minority or border tourism, or the Hong Kong or Taiwan markets. The industry's historical development, its impact on the Chinese economy and ecology, and its current and future markets are examined extensively. Tourism in China also examines: the impressions of Western travelers in China during the 19th century the tourism boom and its development since 1978 the development of ecotourism in China's nature reserves the effect of the tourism boom on the hotel industry the development of theme parks in China. With two-thirds of China's provincial governments committed to making tourism one of their pillar industries, it is essential that tourism professionals, academics, and students around the world have a thorough understanding of this leader in current and future world travel. Tourism in China provides a detailed look at how the country’s tourism industry was built and how it will continue to expand. Helpful tables and figures, as well as a glossary of relevant terms, make the information easy to access and understand.

One China, Many Taiwans shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary "One China," tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide.

China is forecast to be the primary tourist destination and tourist-generating country by 2020. However, much of the writing on tourism in China has come from people within the English academic world who are not involved in the issues related to Chinese tourism development. This book provides a voice to Chinese mainland academic researchers and examines the nature of tourism research and tourism development in China. Contributors, many of whom are based in China and are immersed in the daily issues of teaching, researching and planning tourism development within China, discuss issues related to resource use, destination image and community participation with case studies that combine conceptual frameworks and practical issues. This authoritative text on tourism in China will be of interest to scholars and students of tourism throughout the world.

While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely touted tourism for its potential to bring wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but the policies underlying the development of tourism obscure some complicated realities. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor. A Landscape of Travel investigates the contested meanings and unintended consequences of tourism for those people whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in China’s rural ethnic tourism industry: the residents of village destinations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), Jenny Chio analyzes the myriad challenges and possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to do the work of tourism. She addresses the shifting significance of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of tourist photography, and the effects of touristic desires for “exotic difference” on village social relations. In this way, Chio illuminates the contemporary regimes of labor and leisure and the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern in China today.

This beautiful guide makes the vast enigma of China accessible to every visitor. Continuing the series' winning formula, this new edition combines in-depth, up-to-date descriptions with dazzling photographs, detailed maps, cutaway illustrations of renowned structures, and a wealth of useful travel tips organized by cities and areas.

China has witnessed a dramatic development of tourism in urban context in the past thirty years, especially with its success in hosting the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and the Shanghai World Exposition in 2010. Urban areas as tourism destination are receiving increasingly more popularity than traditional destinations such as national parks, natural reserves, and historical relics. Deriving largely from a special issue on "Urban Tourism Development and City Destination Marketing" (Journal of China Tourism Research), Urban Tourism in China presents the readers with a collection of nine independent research reports examining issues such as consumer behaviour in urban destinations, the social impact of tourism, destination image, leisure, regional collaboration, and heritage tourism in ancient towns. The investigations covered urban areas of different scales and diversified nature from major metropolises such as Beijing, and Guangzhou, to ancient towns like Lijiang and Pingyao. Readers who have interests of tourism research, business development, and in-depth understanding of urban life in China may find the book informative and interesting. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of China Tourism Research.

This book analyzes a broad variety of tourism products in China, Asia and Europe that employ both cutting-edge IT technologies and advanced methodologies. These products are cultural tourism, recreational tourism, sport tourism, adventure tourism, medical tourism and more. Authors from different areas contributed to the book, including academic researchers, graduate students, government administrators and industry practitioners. The book covers the entire chain of tourism product business processes: product development and improvement, tourist behavior analysis, marketing and sales, customer service, etc. In addition, it addresses related issues such as tourism sustainability, policymaking, environmental protection and human resource development. Big data processing, data mining, visual content analysis and textural content analysis, semantic nets and sentiment analysis are among the cutting-edge technological tools used to study tourism product development here. The book gathers selected papers from the 9th International Conference on Tourism and Hospitality between China and Spain (www.china-spain.org) with participants from 18 countries. Though the book is mainly intended for researchers and policymakers, it will also appeal to a wider audience, due to its first-hand content, insightful analysis and broad geographic coverage.

The People’s Republic of China has changed from a country which actively discouraged tourism into one of the major source markets for the international industry; the 35 million Chinese travelling across the border in 2005 are merely the tip of the iceberg. China’s Outbound Tourism is the first book on this major development and has been written using a multitude of sources from China and around the world. The topic is approached from many angles, using methods from the fields of economics, political sciences, sociology and cross-cultural studies. The book explains the economic and social background of the surge in tourism and the changes in policy in the country since 1949, when it moved from prevention through controlled development to encouragement of outbound travels. Throughout the book, facts and figures are given for the global development as well as in-depth information about China’s key destinations. The growing importance of tourists from China is however not just a question of quantity; the text explains the features which distinguish their travel motivations and behaviours from ‘western’ and Japanese tourists, and the consequences for product adaptation and marketing methods for destinations interested in attracting and satisfying Chinese tourists. Arlt’s groundbreaking book cannot be ignored by professionals, academics and students of tourism and leisure; it offers fresh insight into the topic and indicates some of the future lines of development in this area.

Twenty years ago, commercial tourism in the People’s Republic of China hardly existed. Today, China has a burgeoning tourist industry, characterized by a unique style with deep roots in traditional Chinese culture. Scenic Spots is an engaging exploration of why Chinese tourists pursue certain kinds of experiences, what they make of them, and how their experiences and interpretations are shaped by the state. Working from within a Chinese cultural framework, Pál Nyíri argues that China’s brand of tourism is distinct from the traditions of both Western bourgeois tourism, which values authenticity, and Soviet tourism, with its emphasis on rugged and selfless experience. In China, tourism development is guided by the state, and “scenic spots” (jingdian) and theme parks are used to demonstrate China’s heroic past and as tools of patriotic education and modernization – or as forms of “indoctritainment.” The tourist site is perceived as a product, and, as such, it is bounded, approved, rated, and consumed. In a style both straightforward and provocative, Nyíri argues that the uniformity and undisguised commercialism of Chinese tourist sites are a direct result of the state’s ultimate authority to determine the meaning of landscape and to control culture. Scenic Spots serves as a lens through which to explore mechanisms of cultural control and resistance in a highly commercialized sphere of everyday life in contemporary China.