Study On The Impact Of Tourism Development In Historic Villages And Towns In China

China has a great amount of historic villages and towns, distributed in a broad area with relatively high cultural value. Because of inconvenient position and lag of industry, the development of these areas present an obvious characteristic that can be called"culture economy", among which tourism is an important approach.Tourism development in historic villages and towns in China dates back to the mid 1980s, with a history of more than 20 years. During recent years, tourism has become a pillar industry in more and more rural areas. As is pointed out, tourism is both a blessing and a curse: it brings benefits to local people as well as negative impacts.Research of tourism impact is an essential part in the field of tourism sociology, which derives from America and Europe in the 1960s. This paper focuses on a certain tourism destination: historic villages and towns: first, they are classified into 3 different modes namely collectivity operation mode, enterprise operation mode, government operation mode and then they are evaluated from 4 aspects: economy, society, culture and environment. Three mature villages or towns are chosen in the case study to analyze the tourism impact: Cuandixia in Beijing, Hongcun in Anhui province and Zhouzhuang in Jiangsu province. Most materials in the parper are first-hand information gained from field investigations during which the author interviewed nearly 200 people including policy makers, local residents, entrepreneurs and visitors. Following tourism prosperity, several disturbing patterns are disclosed. The highlights of the research include the gambling between different stakeholders and its social mechanism; the conservation of rural context and architectural heritage; the management of tourism development and some other widely concerned issues such as land use, commercialization, social segregation and so on. Based on comparison, the paper summarized the positive and negative impacts emerged with tourism and proposed several approaches for the sustainable development of tourism in these areas.