A Critical Review on China's Inbound Tourism

Abstract

The development and evolution of inbound tourism is a complex dynamic process. With the continuous complex changes of the current world situation and the rapid and healthy development of China's economy, the existing research cannot fully and truly reflect China's inbound tourism development. Based on the two major indicators of inbound tourists and international tourism revenue, this paper compares the development of inbound tourism market of six Asian tourism destinations including China, and concludes that China's inbound tourism market is sluggish with slowly growing number of inbound overnight foreign tourists and decreasing inbound tourism revenue. In the past decade, the growth rate of China's inbound tourism is not only lower than the average level of the Asia Pacific region, but also lower than that of Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, India and other neighboring countries, and even the market share of Europe and the United States is low. The factors affecting the development of inbound tourism are very complex. Through literature review, it is considered that it is very likely that Chinese tourism destinations cannot meet the perception and preference of foreigners, which requires tourism researchers to pay attention to the introduction of new materials, new theories and new methods when analyzing China's inbound tourism.