Abstract
Land border tourism in China serves as a pillar industry in local economic development and is an important sector for international cooperation. This paper aims to fill the gap in the spatial pattern of land border tourism resources in China using geographical information systems (GIS) and spatial statistical methods. The pattern was analyzed from the aspects of numerical features, spatial variance, and spatial association at different spatial scales. The results show that 3341 land border tourism resources in China reveal significant clusters and outliers at both the prefectural and county scales, offering useful information for the management of tourism resources. Physical factors, cultural diversity, regional policies, the relationships between neighboring countries, and public facilities are shown to be the main factors influencing the patterns. It is suggested that the government should adjust its management policies based on the characteristics of local resources, conduct combinatorial development of different types of resources, strengthen the cooperation domestically and internationally, improve public facilities, and protect the local environment and ethnic culture.
Highlights
The number of international tourist arrivals, including border tourists, increased to a total of 1235 million (3.9%) from 2015 to 2016
Based on data from 3341 land border tourism resources collected from various sources, this study analyzed the spatial pattern of land border tourism resources in China
The results showed that the buildings and facilities are the largest first-level type and the comprehensive cultural tourism destination is the largest subtype of land border tourism resources
Summary
The number of international tourist arrivals, including border tourists, increased to a total of 1235 million (3.9%) from 2015 to 2016 (http://www2.unwto.org). Border tourism has become an important sector as a growing source of foreign exchange earnings, and has created employment opportunities for the border areas [1,2,3]. Border tourism makes a big contribution to the promotion of mutual understanding among people from different countries that have different religious beliefs and cultures, which is important for regional stability and sustainable development in the border areas [4,5,6]. The positive and negative impacts on the social, economic, and environmental development of border tourism have attracted the attention of many researchers [4,9,10,11]. The particular location and political sensitivity of the border areas make the management of the border tourism more important and complicated. The cooperation mode, cooperation policies, laws and regulations, and their effects of various tourism sites were analyzed as research hotspots [12,13,14,15]
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