1st Edition
Heritage Tourism and Cities in China
China has surged into the 21st century as one of the most rapidly modernizing countries in the world. Its burgeoning cities reflect this extraordinary growth with a dazzling array of new architectural forms and designs. In its transformation, the 5000-year old heritage of its built civilization, embedded in its villages, towns and cities, has often been replaced. The Chinese Government, aware of the value of this heritage, has in recent years taken concrete steps to conserve and preserve not just national icons such as the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, the Great Wall of China and the Grey Goose Pagoda in Xian but also the more general historic fabric of its urban development over the centuries. The challenges are great, particularly as population growth and rural-urban drift have combined to place enormous pressure on city resources. The chapters in this book explore these challenges as well as analysing other institutional, cultural, social and economic issues related to urban heritage conservation and utilization, with a focus on the role of tourism in reinforcing conservation values by finding new uses for old buildings and districts. This book covers new areas of heritage tourism research in Chinese cities.
The chapters were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Heritage Tourism.1. New interests of urban heritage and tourism research in Chinese cities
Honggang Xu and Trevor Sofield
2. The heritage of Chinese cities as seen through the gaze of zhonghua wenhua – ‘Chinese common knowledge’: Guilin as an exemplar
Trevor H. B. Sofield, Fung Mei Sarah Li, Grace H. Y. Wong and Jinsheng Jason Zhu
3. Suzhou’s water grid as urban heritage and tourism resource: an urban morphology approach to a Chinese city
Werner Breitung and Jing Lu
4. Industrial heritage tourism development and city image reconstruction in Chinese traditional industrial cities: a web content analysis
Xueke (Stephanie) Yang
5. Spatial–temporal distribution characteristics of industrial heritage protection and the influencing factors in a Chinese city: a case study of the Tiexi old industrial district in Shenyang
Xiaojun Fan and Shanshan Dai
6. Transnationalizing industrial heritage valorizations in Germany and China – and addressing inherent dark sides
Leilei Li and Dietrich Soyez
7. Impacts of urban renewal on the place identity of local residents – a case study of Sunwenxilu traditional commercial street in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China
Ding Shaolian
Biography
Honggang Xu is a Professor from Sun Yat-Sen University. Her interest is tourism geography. She is a senior Editor for the journal, Tourism Geographies, and has published widely in leading international journals with her students and colleagues in China and abroad, and is a frequent presenter at international tourism and geography conferences around the world.
Trevor Sofield, Visiting Professor, Center for Tourism Planning and Research, Sun Yat Sen University, China, has been involved in more than thirty tourism planning & development projects and research in China for the past 25 years. Originally from Australia he has undertaken more than 100 tourism projects in more than twenty other countries in the Asia Pacific region and Africa, including with UNESCO.
