ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a context for specifically Chapters 9 to 13 that represent contributions that discuss aspects of cultural tourism within China. By their nature they tend to represent developments at specific sites, and thus represent issues at a destination or regional level. This approach has several advantages in that they illustrate the ‘on the ground’ concerns of peoples and administrations as they seek to cope with growing numbers of visitors and design products to appeal to those tourists. But their very specificity effectively silences other debates, and thus this chapter seeks to establish a framework for those debates. The chapter is thus based around an unconventional approach to cultural representation and tourism in that it tries to offer explanations of such issues within a framework of an eroding statism or central command economy in current Chinese developmental policy. It is thus divided into sections that first note long-established themes in tourism and its impacts on communities and their culture, it considers economic sectoral analysis with reference to work undertaken by German analysts of the restructuring of the East German economy after 1989, indicates some issues of representation of culture in Chinese tourism promotion and ends by reference to the models of tourism development offered by Weaver (2002).
