Title: China's heritage tourism: a double-edged sword

Authors: Sun Xiaoya

Addresses: Department of Tourism, Sichuan Normal University, The Airport Campus, Chengdu, Sichuan 610207, China

Abstract: World heritage is the crystallisation of human culture and wisdom and is also the important resource for tourism development. Heritage tourism has brought vigour and vitality, but also produced a number of adverse effects, so it is also a double-edged sword. The paper takes Lijiang ancient city of China as an example, and uses questionnaire, interview and so on to reveal and discuss the influences of social culture from the heritage tourism. The results show that heritage tourism brings both advantages and disadvantages on social culture. Because of the special status and more positive value of heritage tourism, and people's more expectations, this paper studies the measures dealing with the negative influence of heritage tourism from multiple angles, including some new ideas and methods among them, so that we can put the negative effects to the minimum and make the heritage tourism has a full play in the positive role.

Keywords: heritage tourism; social culture; social impacts; reverse marketing; community tourism; China; world heritage; human culture; wisdom; tourism development; Lijiang; ancient cities; negative influences; leisure marketing; tourism marketing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLTM.2013.052627

International Journal of Leisure and Tourism Marketing, 2013 Vol.3 No.3, pp.252 - 266

Received: 14 Nov 2012
Accepted: 12 Dec 2012
Published online: 14 Mar 2013 *

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