Invisible Cities



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2.3 Conclusion on tourism


From above analysis, it is clear that international tourism has experienced three phases of evolution. The tourists in each phase have their own characteristics, and the similarities exist as well.

In the first phase began from 1949, Mao’s era, the international tourism is solely used as a diplomatic channel. Under the extreme central-planned economic system, the market of tourism did not exist, or seriously under-developed, which is the unique feature in this time period. The origins of tourists differed by the point of broken-up with USSR, where were Eastern European countries dominated ex ante, and western countries ex post. In the end, the disaster of Cultural Revolution disrupted economic development in all the sectors, so the expansion of tourism was a non-existed issue during 1967 – 77.


Thanks to the “Open Door” policies from 1978, tourism industry experienced a rapid expansion in the second phase. Tourism was liberalized to the commercial world for the first time by becoming a contributor of GDP in China, comprehensive developing projects carried out, covering throughout heritage sightseeing, festivals, transport infrastructure, accommodation, and human resource. However, the sustainability of tourism was an ignored issue in this phase. As a consequence, international tourists coming for all over the world, can be segmented according to two major purposes: business and leisure.
The third phase started from 2001. It inherited the trend of growth from the last phase. Most importantly, the uneven geographical distribution is discovered, that the majority of international tourism falls on the east than the west parts, in line with level of economic development. Three hot spots of international visits are Circum–Bohai Sea Region, Yangtze River Delta, and Pearl River Delta. Besides leisure and business, other niche markets are also inevitable, which educational, medical, sports, events, adventures are all components of Chinese tourism market.
The most remarkable impact on tourism came from the mega events, Beijing Olympics and Shanghai Expo. The result from both statistical numbers and image perception researches showed that Shanghai achieved a bigger success than Beijing. The decline of international visits during August 2008 can be explained by stricter visa requirement for business applicants due to the terrorism attack happened in Tibet early in March.
From the positive side, both cities conducted projects to promote international tourism, similarly, new terminals of airports started to operate just before the two events. New landmarks were built, and have become tourist attractions during and after the event. Furthermore, the success of Shanghai radiated the entire YRD region. Integrated tourism projects provided convenience of visits and thus boosted tourism inflow.

2.4 Air pollution and its status quo in China

2.4.1 Introduction to air pollution


Air pollution indicates that the Earth’s atmosphere contains abnormal concentration of particular matters, biological molecules or other harmful materials. Air pollution is a threat to human’s health, proved by the evidences that the toxic composition in the particular matters has a causal relationship with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases (Peng, et al., 2009).
To measure the quality of air, one frequently adopted indicator is the concentration of particular matter, named PM 2.5. As introduced in the first chapter, the concentration of PM 2.5 in some Chinese cities is several times higher than the standard international requirements set up by WHO.
Before going in depth into the tourism, the influence of air quality on the benefit of urban development as a whole has been investigated. The most frequent studied topic is housing prices, that willingness to pay for a dwelling house is very sensitive to the marginal improvement or damage of air quality, and therefore indicated a demand of clean air (Harrison Jr. & Rubinfeld, 1978). Certainly, better air quality is always favorable, especially in the urban area. A severe contamination issue has no added value to a city endeavoring to pursue a positive image to its visitors. The weather of severe haze frequently occurred has reflected an environmental problem in Chinese cities now. The intensive news coverage and research focus, have undoubtedly created a worrying picture for the public, and will probably tarnish the image of Chinese cities as tourism destinations. Although there is a paucity of researches shown the impact on tourism in China of this issue, it can be conceived that it moves to the negative side, since weather and environment have great importance for tourists’ experience at the destinations (Brunt, Mawby, & Hambly, Tourist victimisation and the fear of crime on holiday, 2000).
In fact, the issue of air quality is not a new topic in China. It has been recognized after 1978, since it was worsened significantly because of the rapid industrialization (Li, Zhou, Li, & Chen, 1995). A lot of the scientific researches about pollutant components in the air (Kleeman & Cass, 1998; Bell, et al., 2009; Peng, et al., 2009), or air quality in general, published after 1990s analyzed the result of experiments that captured and measured data for a period of time in certain spots.
In addition, some comparisons are also made with other cities in the international level. For example, for the mass concentration of PM 2.5, Beijing had a highest average value of 102μgm-3 in 2001 to 2002 (Duan et al., 2006), while only 16.8 in Amsterdam (Vallius et al., 2005), 32.85 in Sao Paulo (Degobbi, Lopes, Carvalho-Oliveira, Munoz, & Saldiva, 2011), and around 14.2 in several cities in the U.S. (Thurston, Ito, & Lall, 2011).

2.4.2 the status quo in China


It has become a public attention, because frequent occurrence of haze weather in the eastern part of China, and the danger of air pollution is aware by publication of mass media. Wang et al., (2014) presented a map of geographical distribution in eastern China based on PM 2.5 concentration. It is the most detailed description at the moment for the whole picture of air pollution in China. The observation was made from January 12 to February 1, 2013, found that the northern regions suffered from PM 2.5 more than the southern regions, which can be explained by the time period of this experiment, dropped in the winter, which northern regions had heating system working on. It is also noticeable that high concentration of PM 2.5 occurred in Shandong peninsula and North China Plain (Hebei Province), which can be explained by not only heating reasons, but also industrial production. The influence of topographical reason is also inevitable, which Taihang Mountain sheltered the wind from the sea, thus air pollutants are easy to stuck in this region.
Note that there is no observation in the western China because of the limitation of this research. But the air quality in the west will be taken into account in the later analysis of this dissertation.

Figure 3: Spatial distribution of PM2.5 (μg m-3) in China for days: (a) January 12, (b) 13, (c) 14, (d) 15, (e) 16, (f) 29, (g) 30, (h) 31, and (i) February 1. Grids in blue mean no data provided.



Source: Wang et al., (2014)





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