The state-led tourism development in Beijing's ecologically fragile periphery: Peasants' response and challenges

Abstract

A top-down rural sustainable strategy via rural tourism has been recently advocated as a feasible and appropriate option to engage Chinese peasants of scenic mountainous areas to revitalize the local economy. The northern and western hilly Beijing being protected from urban expansion has turned out to be an ideal choice for its proximity to a potentially large middle-class clientele. We explore theoretically and empirically the contradictory unity between local peasants’ entrepreneurial undertakings (decentralized competition) and top-down tourism development plan (monopolistic centralization) in a mixed-governing “common-pool resource” (CPR) situation in local rural tourism in China. This paper contributes towards a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of local land use regulations on rural tourism development and the conflict-resolution in benefit sharing negotiations between local communities with public authorities and mega tourism project developers in the land expropriation and heritage conservation process. Supported by field surveys, two cases of tourism business are analyzed using the argument on CPRs and multilateral monopoly relating to access and rights of use of collectively owned rural land, and how this monopolistic power has been established in rural tourism development. Our study highlights the importance of the village autonomy in deploying their contestation and bargaining power in safeguarding their land rights and sustaining a vast ecological system and rural tourism commons, while accepting tourism as their newly established livelihood.