Research On Community Impacts Of Rural Tourism Development

As a kind of new generation tourism product with the combination of tourism industry and agriculture industry, rural tourism is developing quickly on the tourism market. The evolution and development of rural tourism has an philosophic and realistic significance because of its protection on nature environmental surroundings and traditional culture. As a saying said in tourism industry, "Only natural things belonged to human races ,only national things belonged to the world." It is an important guide line of tourism sustainability. Tourism industry is still in the beginning stages in China, as a result ,it has exposed a series of problems. Although the community impacts of rural tourism development has been noticed by the tourism researcher and the enterprises, the interactive impacts between rural tourism development and the community are ignored universally.This thesis paper mades an exploratory study of the community impacts of rural tourism development through community approach and case study. The theory backgrounds and relative concepts were first introduced. On one hand, the author defines the concept of rural tourism from the industry fusion angle, on the other hand ,defines the concept of community from tourism angle. Then the author summarized the interactive impacts between rural tourism development and the community by a literature review from domestic and foreign angles. The third part of paper is an case study .As a typical case of successful rural tourism development ,Weihai Hekou "Jiaodong Fishing Village" was conducted to test the hypothesis that interactive impacts exist between rural tourism development and communities through certain factors. The author investigated the fishing village by a profound visit and questionare from two angles according to the literature interview of the second part. One angle is the impacts of rural tourism development on Hekou community ,the other is the impacts of Hekou community on the rural tourism development (basically from the perceived attitudes of Hekou community residents on the rural tourism development and the degree of community involvement). According to the successful experience of Hekou village, the author puts forward a model on fostering perceived positive attitudes of community residents. The impact factors include: the intuitive understanding of tourism, economic dependence on tourism, perceived tourism impacts on host communities'economy ,society and culture, tourism operating model and interests distribution mechanism ,etc. Finally the paper commented on the current issues of interactive impacts between Chinese rural tourism industry and community, and future community involvement strategy for Chinese rural tourism industry in a harmonious society was proposed. The basic problems between Chinese rural tourism industry and community are: the neglect of leading role of community on consciousness ,imbalance of playing chess between community residents and interest relatives on system. The author puts forward a few solutions: equilibrium interest distribution system and native operation of rural tourism development.