According to media reports, China plans to finance 10,000 villages by the year of 2010 to help promote the tourism development in the rural areas. CNTA plans to enlarge support to the tourism industry in China’s rural area and advance the rural travel service system, helping the countryside explore its travel market and strengthen tourism personnel training. China will be able to provide 350,000 job opportunities for farmers and their net income is expected to increase by five percent by the year of 2010.

Currently, rural China receives little of the benefits that tourism brings to large cities or world famous tourist attractions. The cycle of promotion and increased investment in popular sites means that most domestic and inbound tourism ends up in a handful of well known attractions.

Unless fairly urgent action is taken, the quality of tourism in China is likely to further deteriorate. China's Top 100 classic sites are over-saturated and access to other sites is frustrated by lack of information, poor management and difficult access.

For example, despite significant stretches of interesting parts of the Great Wall in the Beijing area, 99.5% of tourists are channelled into just four locations: Badaling, Mutianyu, Jinshanling and Simatai. Every major tour agency offers tours only to these locations, despite easily accessible parts within just a few kilometres of each of these locations. It is a similar story elsewhere in the country.

Investment into preparing rural areas for an influx of tourists should take into consideration the very different conditions that exist in these areas, their unique eco-system and cultural background. Any tourism drive should also consult the wishes and aspirations of the local communities. While it is certainly true that jobs in tourism are less destructive to the environment than jobs in heavy industry, chemicals or logging, the limitations of tourism as a reliable income source must be considered. Tourism is seasonal in nature and is affected by local, regional and international events - natural and man-made.

Carrying capacity

development should be planned on the basis of realistic expectations of tourism flows and sustainable long term management of a site. Allowing unchecked infrastructure development risks diminishing the emotional experience tourists derive, while pushing capacity beyond the limitations of the place will jeopardise its long term economic benefit.

Visitor Experience

Scenic areas attract development of restaurants, hotels, souvenir shops and street vendors. Their efforts in attracting the attention of the visitors harms the overall experience at the site and leaves the visitor with a negative experience. This harms the visitor, the vendors and the site. As long as the management authority is receiving an annual fee from rental income they have no incentive to alter this situation.

Interpretation
Rural sites lack any form of interpretation other than giant maps on billboards and small panels that do not provide meaningful information to foreign tourists. At one beautiful Buddhist cave complex, the only information provided on the signboards is the fact that the frescos are "beautiful" and that they cover 530 square metres. Even the best provincial museums lack adequate interpretation. Locally produced guidebooks do not help, so visitors (including many domestic visitors) travel with foreign guidebooks, and an opportunity to earn additional revenue locally is missed. A further assumption made at many sites is that visitors understand already the history or chronology of places. Experience suggests that even few Chinese understand sufficiently to construct a mental picture of what they are seeing or how it relates to them or even to China as a whole.

If independent travel is to be encouraged, access to information is crucial, as those who prefer to travel alone would rather study their own information than follow a guide with a megaphone.

Expanding China's travel themes

Local tourism authorities and the media constantly portray China as a cultural tourism destination, yet few tourists travel specifically for cultural tourism purposes; more often than not, visiting cultural heritage places is an incidental activity to other travelling purposes. There is almost no investment in adventure tourism, almost no investment in eco-tourism, nor in a hundreds of other sectors of the market that might spread tourist income beyond the famous UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Communicating effectively

Some international tour operators who send groups to rural China work through local suppliers in the main cities. Many do not have knowledge of the rural provinces beyond the one or two major attractions there, often not even realising in which province the attraction is located. Small remote sites cannot hope to match the marketing efforts of established and popular tour attractions. But tourism boards and large tour operators do have the power to raise awareness of alternative tourist destinations and disseminate factual and insightful information about new sites.

Focus on quality and duration, not quantity

For rural areas with smaller carrying capacities, high numbers of visitors do not translate into a success story. In most cases mass tourism to these destinations results in natural destruction and loss of the unique qualities that attracted visitors originally.

Instead, they should focus on niche markets, small groups and individuals who stay for longer and venture further a field. The increased interaction with local communities serves to spread more tourist dollars in the area and stimulates better local involvement.

This report was written with the generous input of Mr. Mark Eadie of ERM China. His full article on the sustainability of Chinese tourism appears on his blog:

• Single Planet blog: tourism site development in rural China