Study On The Feature And Formation Of Diaspora Tourists’ Sense Of Place

Since there are many people have been in a state that they cannot go back home under the pressure of making a living from ancient times to nowadays.These people are named as diaspora community,who have strong attachment to their countries and hometowns and keep desire to go home.With the development of traffic and communication technology,tourism has become more convenient,and the transnational activities are more frequent,whose tourist has a more complex and diverse feelings of travel experience and sense of place.Besides,China is the largest immigrant exporting country in the world,where there are millions of Chinese diaspora scattering all over the world.In other words,Tourism activities formed by Chinese diaspora have become an important part of tourism market with the prevalence of transnationalism in the world.However,the study on this tourist behavior is just started in China.It is significant for both theory study and practice application,no matter it is better for the further expansion of tourism research,or it optimizes the management on this subdivision market,even it can help the overseas Chinese workers deal with relationship between Chinese and Chinese diaspora,especially prompting the return of Chinese diaspora.This thesis takes Chinese diaspora tourist as object from the perspective of sense of place,based on the related literatures on diaspora.First,through a summary of the theoretical and related literatures,this thesis summarizes the research progress of foreign countries and the research shortcoming of domestic study and makes a definition of diaspora tourism:diaspora tourism is a kind of tourism behavior that the diaspora who has a motivation of homesick,finding their ancestor or getting identity visit hometown or other places related to their ancestors,search the history information about their family and try to figure out the culture of hometown.Second,the place identity(sense of belonging,familiarity&landscape perception),place dependence(habit dependence,memory dependence&environment dependence)and the place attachment(emotional&continuation behavior)are studied in this thesis from the perspective of sense of place.Through network text analysis and layer coding,the characteristics of Chinese diaspora are as follows:1.Almost every category and dimension are multifaceted,especially in the sense of belonging.2.The old things or things Chinese diaspora get used to(such as food,old friends and former residence)are the ties between Chinese diaspora and their hometown,so that the Chinese diaspora will feel strange and alienated when something has changed or disappeared.3.In general,Chinese diaspora have shown high recognition to Chinese natural landscapes,cultural and history,but this recognition stays on the nation scale instead of hometown scale.4.In the whole dimension of place dependence,Chinese diaspora tend to show negative dependence.5.There are different emotion expressions and continuity behaviors of Chinese diaspora under the different place identities and place dependence.Third,the differences of Chinese diaspora’s sense of place are studied,based on demographic characteristics and recreational experience features.Through the quantitative study of the questionnaire,there is little difference in the sense of place of Chinese diaspora,such as sex,age,cultural degree and the frequency of travel.However,there are significant differences in the sense of place of Chinese diaspora,such as the income level,the residence of the immigrants,which shows an obvious difference in hometown scale compared with the nation scale.This thesis summarizes the differences as three points:the homogeneity of the sense of place in nation scale&the heterogeneity of the sense of place in hometown scale,the multiplicity of the tourism purposes,the privacy of the tourism process.Finally,the interaction mechanism of Chinese diaspora are studied through the qualitative study of semi-structural interview.There are four different sense of place features of Chinese diaspora based on the classification on place attachment and identity.Through analyzing interaction mechanism of these four features,the thesis finds the formation of sense of place is influence by multiple factors:the internal factor is diaspora identity and the external factor is transnationalism,combined with the various objective factors and subjective factors in diaspora tourism progress.