Challenges in Archaeological Tourism in China
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Challenges in Archaeological Tourism in China Qian Gao 1
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Worldwide archaeological tourism, or tourism to sites with archaeological significance, has been rapidly growing and has attracted increased academic attention in recent years. China is an outstanding case in this field. In fact, its government has been actively promoting tourism and archaeological tourism for the last three decades. The understanding of the challenges that Chinese archaeological tourism is currently facing is the focus of this article. Four aspects will guide the discussion: the dilemma between site preservation and economic profitability, unregulated tourism development, the influence of UNESCO World Heritage designation, and authorities’ sensitivity towards ethnic issues in archaeological tourism. Keywords Archaeological tourism . China . Cultural heritage . World Heritage sites
Introduction Tourism has been transformed into a massive and extensive global industry in the past few decades, and this has also been the case for archaeological tourism, one of its important subsets. Archaeological tourism refers to people’s activity of consuming the past through visiting places of archaeological significance. Archaeological tourism is not a recent phenomenon but scholarly analysis of it has been scant until recently. It was only in the years immediately before the turn of the twenty-first century that a strong interest emerged in this field (Hoffman et al. 2002). Today it is a growing field of study with recent articles exploring a diversity of related issues (e.g., Bowers 2014; Comer 2012; Herrera 2015; Walker and Carr 2013). This recent surge of interest has also produced a growing body of literature in China, one of the countries where archaeological tourism is becoming a key economic asset. Recent publications focusing on this subject consist predominately of analyses of individual case studies looking at * Qian Gao [email protected]
1
Department of Prehistory, Ancient History and Archaeology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Int J Histor Archaeol
issues such as conflicts between site conservation and tourism demand, stakeholder management, tourism planning, and sustainable development (e.g., Liu 2009; Yang 2002; Zhang 2013; Zhao 2011). An examination of this body of literature, as well as some observations made during my own fieldwork, conducted at two archaeological sites in China in July and August 2014, reveals that, even though the difficulties and opportunities involved in the interplay between tourism and archaeological heritage vary across destinations, all the issues mentioned above share many features in common. This article identifies some of the key factors that are behind archaeological tourism in China and the significant challenges it faces as a contributor to the country’s economic, political and cultural development. Archaeological tourism emerged in China in the late 1970s after the central government’s implementation of the BReform and Open^ pol
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