Tourism Development in the High-speed Era in China

With the upgrade of the traffic system,China is in the era of high-speed rail transport.There is a high degree of correlation between the pattern of tourism growth and geographic agglomeration.Traffic improvements would reduce transaction costs,promote mutual changes of concentration and diffusion,and change the growth pattern of the tourism industry.This will result in profound and comprehensive impacts on China's tourism industry.The major changes include three aspects. First,in the dimension of space,by the interaction between the centripetal and centrifugal force,there will be several kinds of functional restructuring including the integration of neighboring cities,the formation of the gridded structure of the region as well as the generation of the national network.Gemini cities will be more closely connected and the urban agglomeration will be integrated.A large number of integrative city and so called 3 hour tour circles are being formed.This will bring about revolutionary changes to the tourism industry. Second,in the dimension of supply and demand,changes in transport will change tourism supply and demand pattern,and as a result,time cost and space cost of visitors will also change.The space-time of tourists' activities will be expanded,shrunk and/or distorted.Theoretically calculated,within the same time,the geographical scope that visitors can reach will expand 4 times.High-speed rail will strengthen the competitiveness of the cities,which will cause concentrated travel demand.In the high-speed era,competition will be more intense. Third,in the country's political and economic dimensions,impact of the transportation industry is closely related with the national macro-political framework.There will be deep-level interaction between tourism industry and urbanization,regional competition,social stratification,the upgrading of consumption as well as a booming of investment.Tourism industry will play a very important role in the situation that socio-economic development is lagging behind of traffic layout.The tourism industry will greatly improve the utilization of high-speed traffic,which will also bring closer the relationship between traffic and tourism.Tourism industry also needs to guard against further uneven regional development,avoiding uneven provision of public service,as well as adapting to the non-convergence problem of transport of the old and the new system. All the development will open up new prospects for China's tourism industry,creating new problems as well as new missions.The whole industry thus needs to make adequate preparations.The paper aims to examine these changes from the perspective of regional economy.It also tries to give some recommendations on the adjustment of the tourism industry.