ABSTRACT

As evidenced in earlier sections of this book, tourism and its planning is a component of overall economic planning in China, and cannot be detached from wider economic policies. As has also been stated, those policies have been motivated by a need for better economic and living conditions for millions of Chinese citizens who thus far have been bypassed by China’s rapid economic development. Indeed, greater disparities of wealth now exist than a few decades earlier when today an emergent entrepreneurial and middle class enjoy higher standards of living that are increasingly on a par with their counterparts in western countries, and who are just as avid shoppers for branded goods as those counterparts; while millions of their countrymen still seek to survive on incomes that are little more than a couple of dollars per day. While there has been considerable emphasis on the success of China’s economic progress centred on the major cities, it is salutary to remember that about half of China’s population is still found in rural areas (Dumreicher 2008). Given this, the emphasis found in China’s academic literature and tourism plans on community tourism becomes readily understandable. Zones of rural tourism with easy access to the new urbanized affluent markets are readily observed around cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, while Chinese policies such as those associated with ‘red–green’ tourism at Jinggangshan (Gu, Ryan and Zhang 2007) provide evidence of attempts to develop tourism in the rural heartlands of China and of the links of those policies with infrastructure development. Indeed, one might observe a belief in the neoconservative economic policies of trickle-down effects as the urban affluent are encouraged to take short breaks in the rural communities to generate tourism spending in those areas.