Abstract

This book provides critical in-depth reviews on key themes and issues in tourism research in China. These themes include: Chinese scholars’ epistemological views of tourism, rural tourism development, community participation in tourism, tourist market and behaviour, tourist attraction management and tour guiding and interpretation in China. While Chinese scholars are often able to access key research in both English and Chinese, the majority of researchers from outside China without knowledge of the Chinese language are unable to read original research from China. This book seeks to redress this knowledge imbalance and bring key Chinese tourism research to the international tourism academic community. This book will be a valuable reference for tourism researchers, postgraduate students and industry professionals.

Given the sheer importance of China it is vital that the informational asymmetry about tourism between the West and China is corrected. This book makes an excellent start in doing this and it will provide essential reading for tourism scholars worldwide.

Songshan (Sam) Huang is Associate Professor at the University of South Australia, Australia. He has been working in the field for over ten years and his research specialties are tourist behaviour, destination marketing, tour guiding and China tourism and hospitality.

Ganghua Chen is Associate Professor at Sun Yat-sen University, China. He has worked in the field of tourism studies for over six years and his main research interests are tourist behaviour, resort governance and tourism policy in China.

Huang and Chen provide a well-balanced treatment of tourism studies and topics in China. They uncover tourism research emphases previously hidden from western minds. Tourism researchers everywhere can now potentially refresh their own scholarship and ideas and build a better understanding of their Chinese counterparts.

Like tourism itself, tourism research and education have grown impressively in China but are rarely well understood elsewhere. This book makes available the insights of Chinese tourism scholars to an international audience through reviews of selected but important aspects of tourism research. It breaks down barriers in tourism scholarship by providing a point of entry to a rich body of knowledge that has yet to be accessed, let alone digested, by most researchers elsewhere.

The book offers timely references for the international tourism community to better appreciate current tourism studies in China. In addition, the book provides ample cases and examples that will be useful teaching materials. In sum, this book makes a great contribution to international tourism academia and should be collected by libraries inside and outside China as well as those who are interested in China tourism development.