Sustainability in Chinese development tourism policies

Honggang Xu and Trevor Sofield

Current Issues in Tourism, 2016, vol. 19, issue 13, 1337-1355

Abstract: Following the ‘Open Door’ policy of 1978 that accepted tourism as an appropriate sector for development in China for the first time since 1949, national and local governments have issued policies to promote tourism. Over the past two decades, the continuing development of tourism has occurred as China has started to move towards sustainability in its national policies. Although sustainability is often stated as the purpose of development, and tourism development strategies are regarded as more environmentally oriented than other industries, little guidance is provided to make sure that sustainability principles are followed. To examine this situation, sustainability components in the two types of tourism policies are examined, including 56 tourism development policies by the state councils and 31 provinces since the 1980s. These indicate a mixed result. While sustainability is an important component in some of these policies, the meaning of sustainability in the tourism sector is confusing and pro-business tourism development still plays a dominant role. It is suggested a pro-active sustainability approach should be integrated with environmental concerns in the future to allow tourism to participate constructively in the national transformation to a sustainable society.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13683500.2013.849665 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rcitxx:v:19:y:2016:i:13:p:1337-1355

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rcit20

DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2013.849665

Access Statistics for this article

Current Issues in Tourism is currently edited by Jennifer Tunstall

More articles in Current Issues in Tourism from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().