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Sustainability and nature-based mass tourism: lessons from China's approach to the Huangshan Scenic Park

With the rapid growth of tourism worldwide, the path towards sustainable mass tourism has become a critical issue for many destinations. Unlike most developed countries, China has its particular context and is testing a process of sustainable tourism development implemented through top-down institutional arrangements, using strict control systems to pursue both natural resource conservation and economic growth. Through a systematic analysis of the path towards sustainable development of a typical nature-based mass tourism destination, Huangshan Scenic Park, this research explores its successes and challenges. It finds that the Chinese government-dominated mass tourism nature-based development model has brought a dual structure with modern efficient management patterns at the core site and municipal scales, and a backward unsustainable situation at the community scale. It also reveals that this model risks running into a potential path-dependency trap, which creates barriers for an integrated resource- and community-based development. The study argues that while the government-dominated and learning-by-doing approaches toward sustainability are practical, the lack of integrated and systematic planning leading to transformation of the destination society as a whole may lead to a suboptimal situation, with problems exported out to surrounding inadequately managed villages and buffer zones. Parallels with other countries are discussed.