A Study On The Relationship Between Local Attachment And Cultural Heritage Protection Of Foreign Operators

The relationship between heritage protection and tourism development has always been a unavoidable question in heritage field. The heritage resource provides attraction for tourism development, while, the tourism as its spring up offers the advantageous support for heritage protection in terms of technology, fund and management, as well as pressure. How to coordinate the relationship between them. The local residents as the behavior subjects of heritage protection, its attitude towards it has been an important driving force for heritage protection.Place attachment as the study of man-land relation developed has been focused by academics in recent years. It throws new light on the reason why human attach to a specific environment. Most foreign scholars present that place attachment have positive influence on environmentally responsible behavior of community residents and tourists, if they attach to tourist destinations, they will have powerful awareness and behavior on environment protection. Furtherly, whether place attachment actively promote heritage protection.Lijiang ancient town, as the World Heritage Site, has paid closed attention to the protection problem. With the rapid development of tourist, more and more non-local owners became the main part of heritage protection instead of the Naxi native residents. This study takes Lijiang as example, non-local owners as the study subject. There are two problems we need to explore. Firstly, if the non-local owners will generate attachment when they have perceived and in harmony with the place. Secondly, whether the place attachment have positive significant influence on heritage protection. Based on previous literatures and case study, a theoretical model was built between place attachment and heritage protection, we then demonstrated the model with the use of field surveys and interviews approaches. And also, our data were analyzed by statistical software to furtherly support the model. Finally, we came to the following conclusion:firstly, the non-local owners’ attachment is above the middle level, while, the mean value of emotional identification is higher than economic dependence. Secondly, the non-local owners’ economic dependence has direct impact to heritage protection behavior instead of attitude, while, it can indirectly influence the attitude by emotional identification. At last, the non-local owners’ emotional identification cannot influence heritage protection behavior only through economic dependence indirectly impact it. At the same time, this paper get a clear direction for future research based on suggestions on heritage protection and some discussions of shortage of this study.