ABSTRACT
Just as other contributors to this book have noted, tourism has experienced tremendous growth in China in the period commencing in the early 1980s as the benefits of a more open economic policy began to be felt. With this growth have come opportunities for many regions previously marginal in social, economic and political terms, and potential beneficiaries of these policies have been rural areas that are becoming enriched through the encouragement of tourism by central and provincial administrations. While actuality has sometimes fallen short of expectation, such economic and social enhancement of the previously marginalized remains an objective of Chinese regional and tourism policies. For a discussion of these problems in the Chinese context see, for example, Gao (1997) and Ding (2004). Like the chapter by Zhang, An and Liu in this book, this contribution identifies problems associated with tourism in rural settings. However, while they sought to establish a link between tourism and community development, this chapter differs by seeking to illustrate how community participation aids the enhancement of tourism experiences for visitors by retaining a sense of the ‘authentic’, while at the same time it describes two different approaches to community-based tourism that are being put into practice in two villages. It is well recorded in both western and Chinese academic literature that tourism offers potential negatives as well as opportunities, such as a loss of natural environments, threats to local traditions and culture, a loss of a sense of both ‘rurality’ and ‘authenticity’ for both host and visitor (e.g. see Bramwell and Lane 1994; Oppermann 1996; Gao 1997; Zhou 2002; Zhong 2004). Additionally, within the Chinese context there exist issues pertaining to service quality and resource (for example, concerns over sanitation; see Gu and Yu 2005) and the problems described by Ryan and Gu (2008) with reference to unbridled competition in Beijing, which also have their counterparts in rural settings.
