Analysis of the Tourism Locations of Chinese Provinces and Autonomous Regions: An Analysis Based on Cities

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1 Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies Vol. 2, No. 1 (2014) (9 pages) World Scientific Publishing Company DOI: /S Analysis of the Tourism Locations of Chinese Provinces and Autonomous Regions: An Analysis Based on Cities WANG Zheng Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences No. 19B YuquanLu, Shijingshan District, Beijing , China wangzheng@casipm.ac.cn CHEN Lijuan College of Resources and Environmental Science, East China Normal University No. 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai , China chenlijuan_log@126.com Received June 10, 2014 Published August 5, 2014 Based on the data collected from cities, this paper analyzes the conditions of tourism location of provinces and autonomous regions. For the method, this paper uses Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and statistical analysis methods to try to analyze tourism geographic conditions from the relationship of tourism industrial location and Chinese arterial highway location, so as to provide a reference for the development of regional tourism. Keywords: Tourism; location; China. 1. Introduction Location is the foundation of regional development and is one of the important elements (Zhang, 2006) for the development of regional tourism. Locational factors can promote or restrict the development of regional tourism. A desired location for tourism can attract tourists and promote the development of tourism, but an undesired location for tourism will have difficulties in attracting tourists and the development of tourism will be restrained. The development of regional tourism relies much on the natural resources and locational conditions. In most circumstances natural resources are difficult to alter, but location, especially the traffic location is relatively changeable. Wang Ying and Wang Zheng (2000) used Yunnan Province as the subject, and proposed the method for analyzing the locations of regional tourism areas (Wu, 2001), afterwards Wang Zheng and Wang Ying (2003) used Guizhou as the subject and studied the restructuring problems of its tourism locations. However, their study is restricted to Guizhou province and cannot address the tourism location problem at the national level. Also, their study focuses on the industrial area location, traffic location is not discussed. In

2 WANG Zheng & CHEN Lijuan fact, traffic location is an important part of the locational theory (Zhu, 2010). It is a critical precondition for tourism development. As researches show, traffic conditions directly influence the decision of tourists when deciding a vacation destination. Traffic technology advancement also greatly promotes the development of tourism. With the focus on the need of the tourism industrial development of our country, this article attempts to conduct a holistic research on the locational properties for regional tourism development. In fact, in recent years, it is not uncommon to see researches on the relationship between traffic location and tourism, but overall, most researches are confined within a single province, a city or a part of a region (Zhu and Chen, 2008), and researches on the national scale is rare. Therefore, this exploratory paper studies the topic of regional tourism location with province as the units. Industrial area location is a concept extended from Thünen s location theory, according to the theory, different areas are suitable for different sub-industries. This article uses the method of Wang Ying and Wang Zheng (2000), and studies the industrial area locations of different provinces. Traffics are divided based on the type of transportation into basic groups like, aviation, railway, highway, waterway, and special tourism transportation. Highway transportation is the most common mode, and usually has direct connection with the tourist site. This article uses highways and state roads as the focal point to understand the importance of transportation on tourist areas. This paper attempts to explore the location conditions due to transportation, or collectively called traffic locational conditions. In addition, resource is the foundation of tourism development. Based on the current Tourist Area (Site) Quality Classification and Evaluation, the quality of the tourism sites are divided into five classes, 5A, 4A, 3A, 2A, and 1A from high to low. Tourist area (site) rated 4A class and above reflects that the area has relatively high quality scenery, environment, and service, representing the top notch standard of tourist resource development and tourist site infrastructure in China, and they are the typical representatives of tourist resources (Zhu and Chen, 2008). As a result, this article uses these types of tourist sites as the research subjects. 2. Model 2.1. Tourism industrial area location model In the classic locational theory (Wang, 2002; Li, 2006), agricultural location is listed as first. Agricultural location was put forth initially based on the studies of agricultural issues, but the author Wang Zheng believes that actually the discussion is on industrial area location. Wang Ying and Wang Zheng used Yunnan province as the example and proposed the concept of tourism industrial area location, their discriminant model is f ¼ T y =T x : T x is the round-trip travel time from place of residence to the tourist site, T y is the time the tourists can spend in the tourist site, f is the marginal utility of the tourist site. If f 1, then T y T x, meaning that if the time tourists can spend within the

3 Analysis of the Tourism Locations of Chinese Provinces and Autonomous Regions Table 1. Division situation of industrial location of tourism resources of provinces and autonomous regions. Name of industrial area Scenic and Historic Sites Special Scenic Areas Tourism Stagnation Areas or Special Resource Areas Natural Scenic and Cultural Customs Areas Distance from tourism hub Central city and Suburb km from central city km from central city km from central city site is longer than the time spent in transportation, the tourists are satisfied, and the tourist site has touristic value. Accordingly, Wang Ying and Wang Zheng have divided tourist sites into four categories: Scenic and historic sites, special scenic areas, stagnation areas special resource area and natural scenic and cultural customs area. The attractions within scenic and historic sites mainly refer to places that are reachable within 1/4 day of travel from tourism hub. In other words, they are close to the central tourism district and the city center; special scenic areas refers to attractions that contain special sceneries and are within 0.5 days of round-trip travel time from the tourism hub, and approximately km from the city center; for natural scenic and cultural customs areas, due to the longer distance and travel time, only attractions that can support over 2 days of activities should be considered within this group, and these areas mainly reside km from central cities. For stagnation areas special resource areas, Wang Zheng (2002) defined them as attractions with small amount of tourists, afterwards, Wang Zheng and Wang Ying (2003) discovered that if the stagnation area has advanced and special resources, then it can be called special resource area, and this area is mainly distributed around km from the central city. Therefore, this paper uses the result from this research, and divides the tourism industrial area locations of different provinces and autonomous regions by distances from the central city, as listed in Table Tourism site locations near main roads Under the influences of industrial area location, local traffic location is crucial. Through studying the tourism development in China, this article discovered that in regions with good traffic conditions, tourism development is also healthy. Under this circumstance, this paper suggests that attractions within the areas of 15 km and 45 km from arterial roads and highways will have developmental advantage. The reasons for choosing these two numbers are that, attractions within 15 km area can reach arterial roads in approximately 1 h, and attractions no further than 45 km from the arterial roads, based on the current conditions of non-arterial roads in China, can be reached within 2 h. According to the principle of utility, it is suitable to develop tourist attractions with half to 1 day of activities. Details are listed in Table 2. Since the

4 WANG Zheng & CHEN Lijuan Table 2. Suitable types of development for each attractions. Suitable type of tours Distance from arterial roads and highways Half day trip [0 km, 15 km] 1 day trip [15 km, 45 km] amount of attractions and the condition of arterial roads are different between regions, the 4A and above rated tourist sites within 15 km and 45 km areas will form the characteristics of the traffic locations for regional tourism. 3. Source of Data and Processing This research requires the basic map data, data from 4A and above rated tourism sites, data of prefectures, data of the spatial distribution of major arterial roads and highways, and the information of the cities connected by each major arterial roads and highways. The basic map data is from basic geography information data of China. Tourist attraction information is from the National Tourism website, as of the end of 2009, there is a total of 876 4A and above rated attractions, within which 125 are 5A and 751 are 4A rated. To prepare for the future analytic processes, the basic map data is used as the base map, Google Earth is utilized to locate the 876 4A and above rated tourism sites, and ArcGIS is applied to build the visualization of point subject image layer (Wu and Xiao, 2012; Zhong et al., 2011). There are 346 prefectures and municipalities (excluding Taiwan province, Hong Kong and Macau are special administrative regions) from the Year Book of Regional Statistic of China (2010). The road data is based on 1:250 thousand vectorization of the traffic map of year 2009 (Xia and Wang, 2012). Lastly, the tourism sites data and road data are individually expressed in Figs. 1 and 2. Fig. 1. The spatial distribution of 4A-grade and 5A-grade scenes

5 Analysis of the Tourism Locations of Chinese Provinces and Autonomous Regions Fig. 2. National road and highway system in China. 4. Analysis of the Conditions of China s Tourism Locations 4.1. Conditions of industrial locations According to the research by Dredge (1999), if one wants to visit a certain attraction, a central city is first selected as a functional center, and then the surrounding tourist areas will be visited. Here, province is used as the unit, the province capital cities are tourist hubs, with the assistance from the Tourist Industrial Area Location Model in 2.1, and the positions of each tourist site of different provinces and autonomy regions are decided by utilizing ArcGIS spatial analytic function, the results are as shown in Fig. 3. According to Fig. 3, first, most tourist sites belong to the scenic and historic sites, and special scenic areas, stagnation areas special resource areas and specially natural scenic and cultural customs areas are relatively less common, accounting for only 6% of the total attractions, indicating that most tourist sites are not too far from provincial capitals. Second, all the provinces and autonomy regions have attractions that belong to the group of scenic and historic sites, but not all contain attractions from the other three groups. For example, Qinghai and Shanghai do not have special scenic areas. In contrast, Beijing and Ningxia do not have attractions in the group of stagnation areas special resource areas. In addition, less than half of the provinces and autonomy regions, like Yunnan, Gansu, Xinjiang, Guangxi etc., have natural scenic and cultural customs areas. However, in regions like Beijing, Shanghai, Hunan, and Hubei, due to their small and narrow geographical area, it is difficult to form natural scenic and cultural customs areas. What worth noting is that a large number of attractions within a province or region is not equal to a large number of types of tourist

6 WANG Zheng & CHEN Lijuan Fig. 3. Location attribute of tourist attractions of each province and region. sites. Lastly, a few tourist sites do not belong to any industrial areas, that is because only attractions that are within 800 km from the central city can be grouped into an industrial area, and those which are too far away from any central city cannot be grouped into any industrial area Traffic location conditions Traffic is an important factor that can restrict tourism development. In order to review the traffic locations, this article conducts research on major arterial roads and highways of provinces. The arterial roads and highways in mainland China are shown in Fig. 2. According to the previous paragraph, tourist attractions within 15 km and 45 km from the major arterial roads have the development advantage. By analyzing the graph and properties, the following points are concluded. First, most of the tourist sites in mainland China are within 45 km from arterial roads and highways, accounting for 96.8% of the total, and tourist sites within 15 km are also common, accounting for 80.5% of the total. Thus, it can be seen that most of the 4A and above rated tourist sites have good traffic locations, and almost all are near major arterial roads and highways. This situation provides tremendous advantage for developing half to 1 day tours. Second, tourist sites of some provinces are entirely within the 45 km area, like Beijing, Fujian, Guangdong, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and Tianjin. Third, through analyzing it can be discovered that there is a strong correlation between the number of tourist sites within 15 km and 45 km areas from arterial roads and highways and the total number of tourist sites of different provinces and regions, as shown in Fig. 4. In other words, a province or city with a large number of tourist sites also has a high amount of tourist sites within 15 km and 45 km from arterial roads and highways, and vice versa. This

7 Analysis of the Tourism Locations of Chinese Provinces and Autonomous Regions Fig. 4. The correlation diagram of the 15 km/45 km attractions and the total attractions of each province and region. indicates that there is a strong relationship between the qualities of traffic locations and the amount of tourist sites within a province or city. This also shows that for provinces or regions with a large number of tourist sites, developing half or 1 day tour is more advantageous Comprehensive analysis of location Detailed analysis of the conditions of the tourist attractions of different provinces and regions are conducted from both the perspective of industrial area locations and traffic locations. In this part, combining the results from above, a comprehensive analysis is conducted on the location conditions for each province and cities. Thus, it provides a reference for different provinces and regions on decision making of tourism developments. Table 3 shows the location conditions of the tourist sites in mainland China. It can be discovered that, without considering the attractions that do not belong to any industrial area, scenic and historic sites, special scenic areas, stagnation areas special resource areas and natural scenic and cultural customs areas that are within 15 km are decreasing in proportion in the above order, even though the proportion of those within 45 km area are not decreasing in the same order, but a trend of decrease is noticeable. Obviously, there is a difference in the traffic locations of the attractions within various industrial areas. Scenic and historic sites have the best traffic locations, natural scenic, and cultural customs areas have the worst traffic locations, and the traffic locations of special scenic areas are stagnation areas special resource areas are neck and neck

8 WANG Zheng & CHEN Lijuan Table 3. The comprehensive case of industrial location and traffic location. Industrial area Attractions within 15 km Attractions within 45 km Total attractions 15 km/total 45 km/total Scenic and historic sites Special scenic areas Stagnation areas special resource area Natural scenic and cultural customs areas Furthermore, through analyzing the situations in different provinces and regions, it can be discovered that, industrial areas in some provinces are all within the 45 km area, and most of the provinces and regions (greater than 80%) have all their attractions within the 45 km area. As a result, it is meaningful to develop 1 day tour in most provinces and regions. However, only Ningxia, Guizhou, Hainan and Shanxi provinces have all their attractions within the 15 km area. For other provinces and cities, only part of the attractions are within 15 km area, and the proportion is not uniform, ranging from just above 10% to over 90%, which means that the abilities of different provinces and regions to develop half-day tour are different. From the above analysis, we can know that, the industrial locations and traffic locations of different provinces and regions are dissimilar, resulting in unique tourism industrial locations respectively. Therefore, each region should consider its own tourism locations when determining the tourism policies, and find a path that is most suitable to its tourism developments. 5. Conclusion and Discussion This article used GIS and statistical techniques to analyze the tourism locations of provinces and regions. The industrial location model of Wang Ying and Wang Zheng is used to study the tourism industrial locations of provinces and regions in mainland China, and the properties of tourist resources of industrial areas of provinces. It also calculated the number of 4A and above rated tourist attractions that are within 15 km and 45 km areas from arterial roads and highways of provinces and regions, and used the number as the factors of traffic locations. Based on this, the industrial locations and traffic locations of each province and city are comprehensively analyzed, the conditions of different tourism locations are formed, and a reference for each region s tourism development is made. Even though this article has analyzed the conditions of the tourism locations of different provinces and regions in China on a macro-scale, further study on the detailed conditions of the tourist sites is still needed, with the purpose of better serving the tourism development in each region

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