A Study On Cultural Heritage Tourism From A Postmodern Perspective

With more and more China's cultural heritages being inscribed to the World Heritage List in recent years, cultural heritage tourism has become the centre of concerns followed by relevant studies on cultural heritage tourism. It is the key to successful cultural heritage tourism exploitation to master the new trend of the tourist market, the tremendous changes in tourists' motivations and behavior patterns, as the result of enormous impacts brought by the emerging Postmodernism as the new era of post-industrial society begins in 21st century. Accordingly, some scholars start applying the methods of Postmodernism to the fundamental researches in the field of tourism, with the ambition to give a fresh interpretation of the unique cultural and economical phenomenon - modern tourism.The thesis attempts to study cultural heritage tourism from a postmodern perspective to examine the subject and the object of cultural heritage tourism and the interrelation between them, trying to cover the blank points of the current researches in theory and provide guidelines to the cultural tourism exploitation in practice.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter one, the preface, introduces significance and background, explains main content and research patterns, clears the relevant definitions and theories of the study and generalizes up-to-date researches domestically and internationally with the supplement of author's views in detail. Chapter two analyzes the object of cultural heritage tourism from two dimensions - time and space with the conclusion of the differentiation law of cultural heritages' cultural characteristics applying postmodern theories. Chapter three focuses on the study of the subject -postmodern tourists from a postmodern perspective, firstly explaining the uniqueness, then analyzing the motivations and behavior patterns of postmodern tourists. In conclusion, there are three types of motivations and four types of behavior patterns shared commonly by postmodern tourists. Culture, reminiscence and experience are the main drives of tourism motivation, while behavior pattern consist of self-guide behavior, in-depth experience behavior, complex pro-consumer behavior and individuation behavior. Chapter four provides principles for virtuous interrelation of the subject and the object of cultural heritage tourism based on conclusion drawn from chapter two and chapter three and the analysis of interaction between cultural heritage destination and postmodern tourists and local residence and postmodern tourists.