Research On The Tourism Competitiveness Of Ancient Capitals In China

In the long history of China, the dynasty changed one after another. The heritage of ancient capitals has been turned into rich tourism resources. With the ascension of archaeological technology, the unearthed ancient capitals and culture relics increased. Beijing,Nanjing, Hangzhou, Xi’an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, Anyang and Datong are the nine ancient capitals in China from Xia to Qing Dynasty. People’s living level is gradually improving. They have more leisure time and their desire to travel is increasing, so they have more demanding requirements on tourism destination. In order to improvement the knowledge and enjoy recreation at the same time, the ancient capital tourism becomes more and more popular. The ancient capitals have unique tourism resources and plentiful tourism value. However, the ancient capital tourism resources are non-renewable resources. Once they are damaged, it is difficult to recover. Even if they are recovered, the ancient flavor is lost. At present, the ancient capitals are damaged seriously, except for Beijing, Xi’an, Nanjing and Datong. The nine ancient capitals have rich heritage, but the economic development level is different, which leads to the difference in tourism competitiveness. It is necessary to build an evaluation index system. The present study collected the related data concerning ancient capitals’ competitiveness in 2012 and applied the quantitative analysis(projection pursuit model, analytic hierarchy process(AHP) and principal component analysis) to calculate and rank their tourism competitiveness. The principal component analysis showed that the nine ancient big capitals ranked as: Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, Luoyang,Datong, Kaifeng and Anyang. China’s capital, Beijing, has affluent tourism resources, whose competitiveness is much higher than the others. The projection pursuit model(PP) and analytic hierarchy process(AHP) showed that the nine ancient capitals ranked as: Beijing,Hangzhou, Nanjing, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, Luoyang, Datong, Anyang and Kaifeng, which is the combination of objective data and subjective evaluation, so the result is more accurate. The results of principal component analysis revealed that the projection pursuit model and analytic hierarchy process are similar. The spatial structure of the nine ancient capitals could be divided as the geographical position and the comprehensive competitiveness. On the basis of the nine capitals geographical position, they are divided as southern and northern capitals.According to the comprehensive competitiveness they are divided into up the average and below the average. The first part are Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing and the second part are Xi’an, Datong, Zhengzhou, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Anyang. The nine ancient capitals were divided into three parts according to the results of Cluster Analysis: Beijing is the first section;Hangzhou, Nanjing, Xi’an, Zhengzhou are the second type, and Luoyang, Anyang, Datong,Kaifeng are the last type. Based on the overall analysis of the nine ancient capitals, the final part of the paper divided the ancient capitals into three categories: the well-developed capitals;the developing capitals, and the backward capitals. This thesis analyzed the current situation of the development of the capitals on tourism, and then put forward different strategies to improve the tourism competitiveness of the ancient capitals.