Tourism as Development Aid: Policies and Challenges for Tourism Planning in Xinjiang, China

ABSTRACT

The emphasis of the paper is an investigation about how tourism has been used to aid the development of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. Xinjiang’s tourism development is being achieved through the Chinese central government’s top-down approach that aims to eliminate extreme poverty and reach long-term social stability. Through establishing partnerships with 19 municipals and provinces, three sub-regions of Xinjiang receive assistance in various aspects of tourism development. Providing detailed narratives on the situation, the paper suggests that the development aid partnerships may not fully sustain Xinjiang’s long-term tourism growth, due to the absence of voices from the local level. The paper calls for an all-inclusive approach that incorporates both the Han Chinese’s and Uyghur minorities’ perspectives. The paper also suggests several future research directions in documenting the progress of Xinjiang’s tourism growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Xinjiang
• development aid
• Uyghur
• ethnic tourism
• Chinese border tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yang Jiao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9435-2423

Yunzi Zhang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0028-132X

Zhenhao Meng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0447-3943