Invisible Cities
Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Relevance
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Chapter 1 Introduction1.1 Relevance“The Invisible Cities” – a novel written by Calvino, has narrated the trips in many mysterious cities in Asia in Yuan Dynasty through the conversation between a famous traveler in the history – Marco Polo and a great emperor – Kublai Khan. Those cities have not only gripped Khan’s attention deeply, but also triggered discussions of normal people over the years because of the poetical descriptions. Of course, those magnificent oriental cities have to be left with those flowery metaphors in the stories forever because they were completely imaginative, but Khan finally never got a chance to reach the land in the east he was always curious about because of the poor mobility at that time – almost 1000 years ago. Luckily, different from the ancient time, the remote destinations can be more easily reached today. People are able to witness the magnificent cities in the eastern continent through their own eyes, although the “visible” cities cannot be as exaggerate as those stories told by the romantic Italian author, the trip to Asia countries will still be very interesting and worthy to experience, because it will definitely bring some fresh and unforgettable memories of the exotic cultures. International tourism has kept expanding in the recent years. The reasons behind it are various, except for satisfying the curiosity. The most appreciated one is the trend of globalization connects the world more tightly. Economically, higher disposal income, especially in the western countries, has made long-distance travelling more affordable; technically, the prosperity of aviation industry increased the accessibility of the remote destinations greatly (Azarya, 2004). Consequently, tourist inflow in Asian and Pacific region has grown fastest, which gained 14 million more international tourists in 2013, a 6% increase than it in 2012 (UNWTO, 2014). As one of the biggest countries in this region, China has contributed enormously to this growth. It gained the popularity as a destination, because several big events ha remarkably improved its awareness and reputation, such as the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai Expo in 2010 (Travel China Guide, 2014). For example, in a survey that Nielson Company conducted across 16 countries, 7 out of 10 international respondents recognized that Beijing appeared a more modern and hi-tech image than what they expected. 51 percent of international respondents expressed their intension of visiting China in the future after watching the Beijing Olympics remotely, while a quarter of the rest had already been to China during the Olympic games, and part of them are willing to visit China again (Xin, 2008). However, the trips to China now seem to be exploring “the invisible cities” nowadays, but it is not because of any romantic reasons – many Chinese cities hazed by the smog of particular matters heavily. In fact, the issue of air pollution in China has been grasped public attention because it has already been frequently disclosed to the media. Sometimes the value of Air Quality Index (AQI) in Beijing can reach above 500 (Fisher, 2013), meaning that every cubic meter of air contains more than 500 micro grams of particular matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometer, and thus any human activities are suggested being avoided according to the Air Quality Guideline published by World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2006). Such substance is a danger for human’s health, because it enlarges the potential of serious health problems such as heart attacks, by going deep into lungs and bloodstreams (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2014). Will the poor air quality prevent international tourists’ visits? The decision of visiting a place depends on many factors, from the demand side, tourist are longing to destinations with enjoyable attractions. Social factors, historical factors, recreational facilities and infrastructure can all influence destination attractiveness, and thus influence tourists’ demand (Gearing, Swart, & Var, 1974). The air quality can be seen as a component of weather, which is one of the natural factors of influencing the attractiveness of the destination (Maddison, 2001). Besides, media also plays a role in travel decisions, while online tourism domain has increased importance, it is often used as a guidance of travelling, and communications via social media changes tourists’ perception on a destination (Litvin, Goldsmith, & Pan, 2008; Xiang & Gretzel, 2010). Success of media publicity will promote positive images of a destination, while a failure will probably become a disaster of tourism industry. While the natural factors, in other words, pleasant environment and scenery in the tourist destination will be a motivation for travelling (Scott & Lemieux, 2010), people will turn away from the places if they perceived pollution exists (Mihalic, 2000). Most of the evidence of negative influence of pollution is collected in the places where tourism is closely tied to natural resources, and there have been rare investigation between pollution and urban tourism. Intuitively, air quality may not matter as strong as the area intensively relying on the natural scenery, because the characteristics of tourism in the urban areas are different from the destinations based on rich natural resources, and the cities have higher complexity (Pearce, 2001). But still, if the air pollution has became a serious issue in some destinations, there will be a reason to suspect that the tourists will avoid travelling there, in other words, the tourism demand might decrease due to air pollution. 1.2 Research QuestionChinese cities are reported suffering from air pollution. Since air quality is one of important natural factors that influencing tourism, it leads to the following research question: How has air quality influenced international tourists for the Chinese cities? Sub Questions In addition, various associated sub questions have been raised to facilitate answering the main question. They will also accomplish a more integrated method of this dissertation through widening the coverage of existing studies and deepening the available information. Therefore, some sub questions are raised as follows: 1. What are the characteristics of the inbound tourists of China?
2. What is the current situation of air pollution in China? 2.1 What is air pollution? 2.2 What are the causes of air pollution? 3. How to measure the attractiveness of a city as a tourist destination? 4. How has media publicity of air pollution influenced the tourism demand? Directory: pub pub -> Project Scoring Template Pre-Construction Phase New Core/Branch Campus Projects pub -> Acm word Template for sig site pub -> The german unification, 1815-1870 pub -> Baltic Olympiads in Informatics: Challenges for Training Together pub -> Preparation of Papers for ieee transactions on medical imaging pub -> Forthcoming meetings and conferences pub -> Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems & Computers, Pacific Grove, ca, November 1978, pp. 55 58 pub -> Forthcoming meetings and conferences pub -> Harmonised compatibility and sharing conditions for video pmse in the 7 9 ghz frequency band, taking into account radar use Download 352.16 Kb. Share with your friends:
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