Research On Multi-group Space Competition And Conflict Tendency In Western Ethnic Tourism Community

The tourism industry in China's western area where the majority of ethnic minorities inhabit, has been developing rapidly during recent several years with domestic tourism booming. Along this development, the local tourism community, as an important social space type, gradually evolves into a multi-group intervention place, in which different groups basing on their different interests and concerns bond to various stakeholders. Meanwhile, the meaning structures of community place become increasingly complicated.However, when local tourism activities continue to expand, on the one hand within the community multi-group conflicts occur frequently among different stakeholders; on the other hand, community tourism planning, management, and interest distribution problems begin to hardly handle. In order to solve these dilemmas, it seems to be necessary to further explore the underlying causes of these phenomena, understand different interest groups'concerns on the development of the community tourism and balance the benefit distribution among multi groups. Unfortunately, the traditional ethnic tourism community researches which often stand in expert perspective taking top-down research pattern to study community managerial and institutional construction failed to effectively address these problems.Community is a unique place and full of meanings. Since human take action based on place meaning, thus, exploring different groups'place meanings and value perceptions would be an effective way to explain multi groups'interest conflict and promote tourism community' sustainable development. The technological advance of "Public Participation Geographic Information System" adopts a down-top research pattern, which can provide a democratic platform for community groups to freely express inner demands and also contribute to the visualization of spatial and attributive characters of community place meanings.In view of that, this study, based on the theories of place meanings and landscape values perception, selects Langmu Si tourism community as a case and adopts PPGIS technology and landscape value method to explore the spatial constitution, distribution and difference of place competition and conflict potential among four interest groups (local Tibetan and Hui residents, exotic merchants and tourists) by building social landscape sensitivity model and conflict potential model. This study hopes to provide theoretical and methodological guidance for the management and planning work of tourism community. Through the study we found the following conclusions:(1) In Langmu Si community the main factors that influent four interest groups' landscape value perceptions and thematic attitude assignments are the length of interaction time with places, the profitability of tourism and the experience depth to specific place. Meanwhile, in this aspect of groups'value perception type, the functional (instrumental) value and symbolic value take the equally important position.(2) Four groups present some common features in the spatial layout of eight different landscape value types which people perceive (including Aesthetic value, Historical and cultural value, Economic (livelihood) value, personal achievement value, Spiritual belief value, Person-environment fit value, Social communication value and Affective attachment value) and the most notable one is that Gansu Monastery, Sichuan Monastery and Grand Canyon are the significantly common high value zones. However, four groups'value perceptions show more differences in spatial structure that every group has its respectively distinctive structural features.(3) The spatial distribution of social landscape sensitivity which reflects place competition and conflict potential is highly heterogeneous with obviously place-directional character and exists as a patch structure. The place type related to high social landscape sensitivity value zones is differently various. In Langmu Si community, the religious sites including two buddhist monasteries and a mosque have the highest sensitivity value, which indicates they are most likely to evolve into a conflict zone. Secondly, the typical tourist attractions and main tourist service areas also have a higher sensitivity value, which are worth paying more attention in the future tourism development and community management.(4) The conflict potential value which is built on groups'attitude difference and place importance shows there are six potential conflict sites in Langmu Si community, namely Gansu Monastery, Sichuan Monastery, Grand Canyon, mosque, main street and Sky-burial site. Among them, the religious sites have the highest conflict tendency and the Grand Canyon is the second one which needs to pay more attention. These potential conflict sites are influenced by groups' attitude difference and perceived place importance. The group's beliefs, values, and the degree of involvement in local tourism activities are also the important influencing factors.