Recent research progress and prospects in tourism geography of China

Based on a large number of domestic literature reviews with related research abroad, academic standards and issues awareness have been intensified in domestic tourism geography, disciplinary consciousness and innovation enhancement. Hence, some valuable achievements have been made in the areas of tourism resources, tourism regional system, the spatial structure of tourism, tourism flow, ecotourism, tourism industry, tourism planning and tourism impacts, which strengthened the traditional advantages of research, expanded new areas of research and made research trends diverse. Meanwhile, with innovation of research methods, tourism geography in China is getting more and more internationally-oriented and reflecting Chinese characteristics. Research trends of China’s tourism geography are prospected: 1) Catering to national strategic needs, persisting problem-oriented, strengthening the metatheoretical research, and building Chinese “localization” of theory of tourism geography and method system. 2) Introducing and assimilating foreign theories and research methods, while focusing on explaining new tourism phenomena and problems in the domestic socio-economic background. 3) Concerning about the new regional spatial processes of demographic process, social process, and spatial process in new tourism trend. 4) Exploring interactive process and mechanism of man-land relationship and new models to develop territorial space under the tourism impacts. 5) Exploring important research issues of tourism geography in global, national, regional and local scales, from the point of view of spatial differentiation, scale transformation, interaction of man and nature, creating tourism geography interpretation system based on “process-structure-mechanism” of China. 6) Building theoretical system actively, while strengthening application-oriented research, and focusing on tourism poverty alleviation, tourism and heritage protection, national parks’ construction and other hot issues. Faced with econometrics research boom, we should return to rational thinking, using big data scientifically, while paying attention to the important role of qualitative evaluation in future research.