Wang Xiongwei

Date of Award

12-2022

Advisor(s)

Hao Ma

Second Advisor

Sarah Jinhui Wu

Third Advisor

Jinjie Wang

Abstract

With the rapid economic development and significant increase in the disposal income of residents since the reform and opening up, both the number of tourists and tourist income have grown at double digits on annual average. Tourism has become an important engine for economic growth. As an important component of tourism, cultural tourism is also developing rapidly and is particularly favored in capital markets both at home and abroad. Most typically, domestic real estate giants like Wanda, Sunac, Evergrande, Zhonghong, and LVC Group, as well as foreign capitals like Disney, Universal Studios and Six Flags have ventured into cultural tourism by investing in cultural tourism projects. Cultural tourism complex is a comprehensive real industry cluster that is based on large-scale buildings or tourist attractions funded by real estate sales as the source of cash flow to attract tourists with cultural magnets and to boost consumption through business operations. It achieves cultural, business and tourism value through traveling and purchasing activities and ultimately promotes the integrated development of culture, business, real estate, and tourism. This research on the formation and evaluation of sustainable cultural tourism will fill the theoretical gap. From a practical perspective, the attributes of cultural tourism, which integrate multiple industries, determine that such projects require a large investment, undergo a long construction period, and have a high degree of operational integration. Investors find themselves faced with realistic problems like how to avoid investment risks, how to operate the cultural tourism projects efficiently, and how to pursue sustainable development. Therefore, it is of great significance to deeply explore the formation process of sustainable cultural tourism, scientifically establish the evaluation system for sustainable cultural tourism and effectively formulate the countermeasures for sustainable cultural tourism, both from the theoretical level and from the practical level, which are also the key issues to be solved in this paper.

This paper first defines the sustainable cultural tourism based on the existing research and theories at home and abroad. It then summarizes the formation process of sustainable cultural tourism by using the grounded theoretical data analysis method and the three-level coding extracted through interviews. An evaluation indicator system for sustainable cultural tourism is also established, including building a framework model (ecological environment-economic benefit-social culture-development guarantee-integrated management) based on previous research findings, determining indicators in the system layer-state layer-element layer through literature induction, frequency statistics and screening based on three times of scoring, and assigning weights to indicators at different levels of the evaluation system for sustainable cultural tourism with the analytic hierarchy process. Finally, the evaluation indicator system for sustainable cultural tourism is empirically applied to Hefei Wanda Cultural Tourism City, following the diagnosis of problems and suggestions for optimization based on the application results.

This research is theoretically significant in the following ways: (1) A definition of sustainable cultural tourism is given. The concept of sustainable cultural tourism is defined from systematic perspectives of ecological environment sustainability, economic benefit sustainability, social and cultural sustainability, and development guarantee sustainability, which address its previous vague and partial definition. (2) The formation of sustainable cultural tourism is explained. Elements and functional route of sustainable cultural tourism are summarized with the grounded theoretical data analysis method, which enriches the theory of sustainable cultural tourism. (3) It establishes an evaluation indicator system of sustainable cultural tourism complex based on the levels including ecological environment-economic benefit-social culture-development guarantee-integrated management, a 5-component evaluation indicator framework model for sustainable cultural tourism is established, which improves the theory of sustainable cultural tourism.

Download

Share

COinS