Ancient town tourism and the community supported entrance fee avoidance – Xitang Ancient Town of China

ABSTRACT

Ancient towns, embedded with traditional architecture, culture and life style, are popular tourism attractions worldwide. Tourism use often transforms residents’ living spaces into shared multi-functional spaces for residents and tourists, which imposes impacts to residents and complicates community and tourism relationships. Entrance fees are widely used as an economic strategy for destination management and benefit re-distribution, triggering changes in relationships with profound implications socially and culturally. A framework is proposed to map relationships between stakeholders and flows of tourism impacts among key stakeholders in ancient town tourism. Readily accessible to a large urban population in the eastern developed area of China, Xitang Ancient Town in Jiaxing City of Zhejiang Province is one of the most famous tourism ancient towns in China. A mixed-methods approach involving both onsite and offsite data collections is used to explore and explain the enduring community support for the avoidance of entrance fee payments by tourists at Xitang Ancient Town. Limited access to tourism benefits for residents adjacent to the ticketing area is identified as the underlying reason for this. Practical suggestions are made to enhance community participation and ensure equitable access to tourism benefits for Xitang and ancient towns in China and elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• Community
• participation
• benefit distribution
• entrance fee
• Ancient town tourism
• stakeholder
• China

Acknowledgement

This research is supported by MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No. 20YJCZH134) to Dr Ming Ming Su.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by Ministry of Education of China (MOE), Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No.20YJCZH134) to Dr. Ming Ming Su.

Notes on contributors

Ming Ming Su

Dr. Ming Ming Su is an Associate Professor at the School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing. She holds degrees from the University of Waterloo in Canada and Tsinghua University in China. Her research focuses on heritage management, tourism impacts, tourism and community relations, tourism at protected areas, and tourism issues in China.

Jingjuan Yu

Jingjuan Yu is a master student in Natural Resources Management at the School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, supervised by Dr. Ming Ming Su.

Yueting Qin

Yueting Qin is a master student at School of Economics and Management, Beijing Forestry University; she did her undergraduate study at the School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, supervised by Dr. Ming Ming Su.

Geoffrey Wall

Dr. Geoffrey Wall is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Canada. He holds qualifications from the universities of Leeds, Cambridge and Hull in the UK, and Toronto in Canada. His research focuses on tourism, recreation and the socio-economic implications of climate change. He is involved in several tourism and environmental projects in China.

Yan Zhu

Yan zhu is a Senior Engineer at the School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing. Her research focuses on resource management, qualitative and quantitative data analysis.