PROGRESS IN GEOGRAPHY ›› 2016, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (8): 932-940.doi: 10.18306/dlkxjz.2016.08.002

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Structure and interaction of China's inter-provincial inbound tourism market: A 2-mode network analysis

Fajian LIU1(), Dongdong CHEN2, Jianhua ZHU3, Zang QIAN1, Binbin LI1   

  1. 1. School of Business, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China
    2. Anhui Broadcasting Movie and Television College, Hefei 230011, China
    3. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
  • Online:2016-08-25 Published:2016-08-25
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41301151;Introduction Project of Academic and Technology Leader in Anhui University, China, No.02303203

Abstract:

The spatial patterns and characteristics of overall inbound tourism markets are an important basis for setting out tourism development strategies in certain regions and across China. The patterns and structures of the inbound tourism market not only depend on the tourist capacities of each region, but also the interactive relationships between the origins and destinations (O-D). This study builds a Chinese inbound tourism market affiliated matrix of provinces to source countries in view of O-D interaction, which is based on a 2-mode network analysis from social network theories, and then analyzes the network by centralities models and singular Value Decomposition (SVD) so as to reveal the functions of each province in the network and the interactive patterns. It concludes that: first, larger tourist capacity of provinces does not create more structural advantages in tourism market interaction network. The overall construction is relatively balanced, and the centralities of provinces are similar to their neighbors'. But otherwise, Korea, Japan, America, and so on, which are the major sources of Chinese inbound tourism market, become the core actors in the network. Second, there are three clusters in the inbound tourism affiliated network, which are the balanced cluster of Asia-Europe to multi-regions in China; the cooperative cluster of Russia to the north-south region of China; the transit cluster of Europe-America to port and inland of China. This is a basis for provinces to select tourist source countries and cooperation partners. These findings may inform inbound tourism marketing program and strategy development, planning itineraries, and designing tourism products for provinces in China.

Key words: inbound tourism source country, market structure, interaction pattern, 2-mode network, inter-provincial, China