ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the whole book. It opens with some background discussions of the global hospitality and tourism education. A brief review of the historical development of China’s hospitality and tourism education is then provided. The chapter further reviews the current state of hospitality and tourism education, mainly in the aspects of scales of the institutions and students, teaching staff, geographical distributions of institutions, students, and teaching staff. Some commonly identified problems and challenges facing China’s hospitality and tourism education, including the structural imbalance of tourism education provisions, problems with the teaching staff quality, low quality of textbooks and unstandardised curriculum articulations, low status of tourism subject in the institutional system, and problems with practice-based teaching are discussed.
