Ancient Village Tourism "communes" Development Model And Its Power Relations

As a basic type of rural cultural tourism, ancient-village tourism has been taken as the most feasible way to conserve and maintain the historic and vernacular villages in China. However, most of the existing relevant literatures discussed this issue from the perspectives of environmental control and cultural heritage conservation, while few from social relations. That makes it both theoretically and practically necessary to make an examination of those developmental patterns prevailing in China's ancient-village tourism, and the power relations under these patterns.Through comparing the tourism experiences of Xidi and Hongcun, two typical and adjacent historic villages in Southern Anhui, this paper examines two typical patterns popular in China's rural cultural tourism developments, and attempts to understand the common characters of these patterns by creating and employing a new Chinese characterized concept of "communal approach" in tourism development. With a systematic analysis of the political, social as well as economic contexts from which this "communal" development philosophy derives, the author argues that the communal approach in tourism development, to some extent, may be seen as an eclectic strategy to achieve a compromise between the democratic ideology and social reality in developing countries, and that also makes this communal approach a sub-optimal option for China's tourism development in ancient villages.For the deficiencies of traditional methods in the dynamic and systemic identification of key stakeholders in tourism development, a new model has been developed to simplify the entire analysis procedure and locate the community, government, and external capitals as the three major stakeholders in ancient-village tourism development. A behavioral analysis of these three parties indicates that the regulation of the power relations among them seems to be a circulatory system with the exclusive right for tourism development and operation as its target.Additionally, the author also concludes that the community participations in tourism benefit and decision-making should not be taken as two separate aspects of community involvement. Instead, it is reasonable to treat them as two successive phases with evolving degrees of community involvement in tourism, and a basic intervene into the tourism benefit sharing is supposed be able to facilitates a betterinstitutional bedrock for fostering the community's willingness and abilities to actively participate in the decision-making process of tourism development.