Sustainability and nature-based mass tourism: lessons from China's approach to the Huangshan Scenic Park

Abstract

With the rapid growth of tourism worldwide, the path towards sustainable mass tourism has become a critical issue for many destinations. Unlike most developed countries, China has its particular context and is testing a process of sustainable tourism development implemented through top-down institutional arrangements, using strict control systems to pursue both natural resource conservation and economic growth. Through a systematic analysis of the path towards sustainable development of a typical nature-based mass tourism destination, Huangshan Scenic Park, this research explores its successes and challenges. It finds that the Chinese government-dominated mass tourism nature-based development model has brought a dual structure with modern efficient management patterns at the core site and municipal scales, and a backward unsustainable situation at the community scale. It also reveals that this model risks running into a potential path-dependency trap, which creates barriers for an integrated resource- and community-based development. The study argues that while the government-dominated and learning-by-doing approaches toward sustainability are practical, the lack of integrated and systematic planning leading to transformation of the destination society as a whole may lead to a suboptimal situation, with problems exported out to surrounding inadequately managed villages and buffer zones. Parallels with other countries are discussed.

可持续发展和以自然为基础的大众旅游：来自中国黄山风景区的经验教训

随着旅游业的全球范围内的快速增长，实现可持续大众旅游的道路已经成为许多目的地的关键问题。不同于大多数发达国家，中国有其特殊的背景，正在测试一个通过自上而下的制度安排实现旅游业可持续发展的过程，并采用严格的控制系统，以追求自然资源保护和经济增长。通过对典型的以自然为本的大众旅游目的地--黄山风景区的可持续发展道路进行的系统分析，本研究探讨了其成功和面临的挑战。报告认为，中国政府主导的以自然为本大众旅游发展模式为核心地区现代高效的管理模式、城市规模和社区规模落后的局面带来了双重的结构。这也表明，这种模式存在着运行到潜在路径依赖陷阱的风险，这为一体的综合性资源和社区发展创造了障碍。该研究指出，虽然政府主导和边学先走向可持续发展迈进的方式是可行的，但通往目的地整个社会的转型中综合性和系统性规划的缺乏可能会导致一个次优情况，以及出口出去至周边管理不当的村庄和缓冲区的一些问题。类似问题与其他国家进行了讨论。

Keywords:

• sustainable mass tourism (SMT)
• nature-based tourism
• path
• scale
• institution
• China

关键词:

• 可持
• 续的大众旅游（SMT）
• 以自然为本的旅游
• 路径规模
• 机构
• 中国

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions which help to improve this paper greatly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note

Notes

1. The number is calculated from the data collected from the Statistics Department in HMC.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Honggang Xu

Honggang Xu is a professor of School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. She received the PhD and MA degrees from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, and the BA degree from Beijing University, China. Her research interests include sustainable tourism development, tourism geography, complexity theory in tourism and cultural impacts of Chinese tourism.

Dan Zhu

Dan Zhu is a PhD student in the School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. Her research interests include sustainable tourism development and Chinese outbound tourism.

Jigang Bao

Jigang Bao is the dean of School of Tourism Management and Director of the Centre of Tourism Planning and Research, at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. His research interests ranges from tourism geography, tourism planning to tourism impact.