Study on the spatio-temporal evolution of coastal city tourism of China

The study on the regional tourism development patterns has become a hotspot in the field of tourism geographies. In recent years, domestic and foreign scholars have mainly focused on the tourism strength, tourism development efficiency, tourism competitiveness, tourism development spatial difference, tourism development spatial patterns and etc. The spatiotemporal evolution of city tourism is the hot-spot of tourism geographies research. This article,choosing China's eastern coastal cities as the research objective, analyzes the temporal and spatial evolution patterns of tourism development. First, it comes to the analysis of the spatio-temporal evolution of coastal city tourism development strength, and then it analyses the spatiotemporal evolution of coastal city tourism development efficiency by DEA data envelopment method.Results show that in the aspect of tourism development strength, there is great difference among the eastern coastal cities. The tourism development strength in the cities of Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone, Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, Liaodong Peninsula and Shandong Peninsula in Bohai Economic Circle is strong, but that on the west side of the Straits Economic Zone and Beibu Gulf Economic Zone is weak. During the ten years, the comprehensive efficiency of tourism development basically maintained unchanged; however, the pure technical efficiency is remarkably enhanced, and the scale efficiency is reduced significantly, which indicates that the development of the coastal city tourism has gradually changed from scale efficiency to technical efficiency. Moreover, through the data analysis of the years of 2002, 2006 and2011, it is found that as time goes by, the polarization efficiency of tourism development comprehensive efficiency has also increased.