Spatial concentration of domestic tourist flow of Chinese rural residents

Tourist flow is a basic question of tourism geography.Accordingly,spatial concentration of tourist flow draws great attention.But present studies have not distinguished its basic types concerning inherent mechanisms.This paper brings in the delimitation technique of Jansen-Verbeke's paper on the basis of domestic tourist flows of Chinese rural residents in 2003~2005.Accordingly,spatial concentration of tourist flow is classified into two basic types,that is,intra-provincial concentration and special-provincial concentration.The results can be obtained as follows: (1) Intra-provincial concentration is constrained by multi-dimensional elements,including provincial size,spatial accessibility,hierarchy of city,socio-economic factors,potential distribution of population,and motivation of travelling.As to the period 2003~2005,about 70% of tourist flows are concentrated intra-provincially.Practically,this examination is helpful to the formation of development strategy called "intra-provincial tourism".Although man-made delimitation contradicts the limitless behavior of travelling,it accords with the true fundamental characteristics. (2) Dissymmetrical flowing of inter-provincial tourist flow induces the formation of special-provincial concentration,characterized by the special pointing which reflects the inter-provincial spatial interaction.Inter-provincial tourist flows mostly inclined to move to neighbouring provinces,to economically-developed regions,to large regional centres in economic,historical and cultural perspectives,to coastal areas."Polycentric and asymmetrical tourism system" has elementarily formed and takes on a stable spatial pattern.Its "centre-periphery" characters have different meanings for centre(i.e.eastern coastal areas) and periphery(i.e.central and western China).Central areas bear great weight of the large-scale inbound tourist flow while peripheral areas seek development due to regional economic disparities caused by development of tourism. (3) To analyze the evolving tendency from dialectic angle,this paper anticipates that intra-provincial concentration will slow down as special-provincial concentration with the increase of people's emissiveness,continual experiments of people's leisure plan,and the increasingly perfect full paid vacation system.Inter-provincial flowing of tourist flow will be much more frequent in the future.