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ABSTRACT
Tourism development is officially recognized by the Chinese central government as one of the strategic pillars of the country's economy. Hence, regional authorities are responsible for developing positioning strategies for their tourism destinations. This study investigates the following: (1) the variety of planned image positions among sub-provincial prefectures in China; (2) the commonalities of these image propositions across China and (3) the differences within and across the regions and provinces. This research is based on a representative sample of tourism development plans of 77 prefectural administrations. The texts (in Chinese language) were content analyzed and condensed in two steps into semantically similar terms and concepts. The results show that image-positioning objectives are generally lean in the planning documents lacking sophistication and creativity. The variety of used image terms tempts to believe in quite different positioning goals. Yet, from a compound perspective, this does not yield very distinct overall image positions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Andreas H. Zins http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0960-1868
Notes
1. There are 34 provincial-level administrations in China, but only 27 of them are used explicitly in this research. Four provincial-level cities, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing, are grouped with nearby provinces for the convenience of selecting samples in this research. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are also equivalent to provincial-level prefectures; but they are not included in this research due to the different administration systems.