ABSTRACT This paper provides an overview and brief evaluation of China���s rural tourism. Beginning with the form of poverty alleviation through tourism, China���s rural tourism has undergone over 20 years of development and exhibited some unique features in its development pattern, scale and business operational models in accordance with China���s political, social and economic systems. Government plays a decisive role in developing rural tourism in China. However, rural tourism has been valued mainly as an economic means for rural development during the country���s modernisation process. Overlooking rurality as an essential issue in rural tourism may lead development to a wrong direction, which could jeopardise the sustainability of the industry. Copyright �� 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 25 January 2008 Revised 6 November 2008 Accepted 11 November 2008 Keywords: rural tourism China. INTRODUCTION Rnationally.botha ural tourism is popular topic in tourism research in China and inter- However, it seems that Chinese tourism researchers are not exchang- ing their research outputs in this particular research area effectively with their interna- tional counterparts. While a burgeoning literature on many aspects of China tourism (e.g. Lew and Yu, 1995 Xiao, 1997 Zhang et al., 1999 Pine, 2002 Lew et al., 2003 Zhang et al., 2005) is easily available to the international tourism academic community, apparently, there still exists a relative dearth of research into rural tourism development in China by scholars outside China. In contrast, due research attention has been paid to rural tourism in an exclusively dedicated issue of the International Journal of Tourism Research in 2004 (Sharpley and Roberts, 2004), which had a similar endeavour to that of a special edition of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism 10 years earlier. Geographically, research in rural tourism published in international tourism journals covers mostly Europe, North America and Australasia, while China seems to have been left out. Rural tourism is largely a domestic phenomenon with a disparate nature across countries and continents (Gartner, 2004 Sharpley and Roberts, 2004). This explains why the current literature in rural tourism has seen a signifi cant number of case studies in terms of countries and rural tourism attractions in different countries. Despite the specifi city of rural tourism to a country���s political, economic and social systems, issues of defi nition and conceptualisation have been sought (Lane, 1989, 1994a, 1994b Sweeney, 1995). Lane (1994b) suggests that rural tourism, as a concept, is a form of tourism that is located in rural areas, is rural in scale, character and function, refl ecting the differing and complex pattern of rural environment, economy, history and location. Sharpley and Roberts (2004) also concluded that two other themes could be identifi ed for rural tourism research. They are rural tourism as ���sustainable��� activity and rural tourism as an agent of rural development. The disciplinary knowledge in rural tourism Copyright �� 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH Int. J. Tourism Res. 11, 439���450 (2009) Published online 30 December 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.712 Rural Tourism Development in China Shunli Gao1, Songshan Huang2,* and Yucheng Huang3 1The Coordination Department, China National Tourism Administration, Beijing, China 2School of Management, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia 3Tourism and Event Management School, Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, Shanghai, China *Correspondence to: S. Huang, School of Management, University of South Australia, Elton Mayo Building EM3- 17, City West Campus, North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia. E-mail: sam.huang@unisa.edu.au

440 S. Gao et al. Copyright �� 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Tourism Res. 11, 439���450 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/jtr appears to have been accumulated in an inductive way by adding new cases from different countries. China is a country with a dominant rural population. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC), China���s rural population in 2006 was 737.4 million, accounting for 56.1% of the country���s total population (NBSC, 2007). Despite the nation���s continuous modernisation efforts, rural development has remained one of the priorities of the nation���s social and economic development policies. The ���Three Nong��� issues, which refer to issues of agriculture, farmer and rural area, have been frequently listed on the national government���s top agendas. It is commonly believed that China���s economic reform started from the rural areas. As the fi rst bold policy step to break the bond of the totalitarian planning economy system, the household production contract system was initiated in rural communities in late 1970s. A household production contract encourages average rural households to increase their productivity. A typical contract would set up quotas for households to give part of their annual production to the country and the collective organisation they belong to, as the compensation for the arable land lease. Once a household can fulfi l the quota, they can get any extra amount of their production for their own consumption. As a result, rural living conditions were improved signifi cantly, and the development gap between urban and rural areas was reduced. However, starting from 1985, the nation���s economic development strategies changed and the national income distribution system once again started to favour city-dwellers. Consequently, the pace of rural development was slowed down. In the late 1980s, some Chinese scholars reviewed China���s socialist development and modernisation process and classifi ed the problems and issues with rural development as ���agriculture���, ���farmer��� and ���rural area���, shortly as ���Three Nong��� issues, for the three words in Chinese all begin with ���Nong���. The ���Three Nong��� issues have since become an analytical framework to solve problems arising from China���s rural development for both the government and academics (Lu, 2004). For a long time, tourism policies have been formulated to facilitate the development of rural regions. Rural tourism, as a means to spur the country���s rural economy and social development, has been attached great importance by tourism authorities at both national and provincial levels (Shao, 2007a). In 2006, the volume of China���s domestic tourism reached 1.39 billion, making China the largest domestic tourism market in Asia (China National Tourism Administration (CNTA), 2007a). Although no statistical data are available to show the share and weight of rural tourism in China���s huge domestic tourism market, considering most of China���s scenic attractions and spots are located in western and rural areas, rural tourism must be a signifi cant part in the domestic tourism. In the late 1980s, some researchers in China started to study tourism in parallel with agri- culture (Liu D., 1989). They defi ne the term ���tourism agriculture��� as tourism taking agricul- tural landscape and attractions as objects to visit. Liu Ming���s study (Liu M., 1989) com- bined the agricultural activities with tourist experiences and for the fi rst time broke through the boundary of sightseeing tourism. However, his research was mainly limited to the fi eld of ���agriculture��� but not studying ���rural��� tourism in a broader sense. In 1990, Ling used the concept of ���rural tourism���, which meant tourism development over rural landscapes and attrac- tions, when he advocated the development of rural tourism resources (Ling, 1990). In the end of 1990s, Wang (1999) introduced rural tourism research undertaken by overseas tourism scholars and systematically elaborated on the conceptual aspects of rural tourism. Yin (2004) conducted a literature review on rural tourism in China based on relevant articles in the China Academic Journals Full-text Database and found that from 1997 to 2003, among 9000 articles in tourism research, only 60 articles were relevant to rural tourism. Regretfully, the research outputs regarding rural tourism in China have been published mainly in Chinese and thus cannot be effectively communicated to international readers. Although rural tourism is signifi cant in China in both its current scale and develop- ment potential, the international academic community has gained little knowledge in this fi eld. This paper aims to introduce China���s rural tourism development and practices to the