Rural Culture Preservation in Rural Tourism Development in the Suburban Villages of Large Cities in China: Case Studies From Nanjing

Conference: The Asian Conference on Sustainability, Energy & the Environment (ACSEE2021)
Title: Rural Culture Preservation in Rural Tourism Development in the Suburban Villages of Large Cities in China: Case Studies From Nanjing
Stream: Cultural Sustainability: Protecting, Preserving and Conserving
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Yuanyue Zong, Southeast University, China

Abstract:

In the context of rapid urbanization, many suburban villages in China have started the tourism-orient transformation by virtue of supporting policies and individual advantages. However, rural cultural decline under disruption and ignorance has become a major pressing issue limiting the rural tourism development and the urban-rural integration process. Recently, scholars and practitioners have drawn attention to the protection, conservation and revitalization of rural culture in tourism development. This research explores the protection and inheritance of rural culture in tourism transformation practices of suburban villages in large cities of China through qualitative and quantitative analysis derived from investigation of 17 culture-featured villages in suburbs of Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. The article identifies the changing patterns in demand and shifts in the attitudes toward rural culture during the rural tourism development through literature review and interviews. Rural culture protecting and promoting strategies are summarized, including culture-related industry introduction, rurality and characteristic highlighting and the collaboration of urban-rural operators. Further, real-time visiting numbers of the investigated villages are extracted from a local service platform (Nanjing Beautiful Countryside Big Data Service Platform) 5 times a day for a month to serve as an indicator of popularity, while comments and ratings from the tourists are aggregated from field interviews and major travel websites. The statistics confirm the influence of rural cultural elements on rural tourism satisfaction. Finally, the article points out the shortcomings in culture construction in the current rural tourism transformation and proposes a discussion on the authenticity of rural culture.

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