Tourism Commodification in China's Historic Towns and Villages:Re-examining the Creative Destruction Model

Historic towns and villages are important elements of China's cultural heritage. They now have a recognized value from a tourism perspective; however, the rapid pace of tourism development in such historic towns and villages has resulted in a series of problems brought about by tourism commodification. Mitchell(1998) initially developed a creative destruction model to predict the fate of communities that base their development on the commodification of rural heritage: she later revisited this model(Mitchell and de Waa?l, 2009). She applied the creative destruction model to the village of St. Jacobs, Canada and demonstrated that entrepreneurial investment had fostered the creation of a setting for aesthetic consumption, and that the sub-cultures contribute to the development of a contested landscape of consumption. The model is divided into a six stage process: pre- commodification, early commodification, advanced commodification, early destruction, advanced destruction and postdestruction. Whether or not the final(post- destruction) stage is achieved is dictated by the power struggle that arises among the sub-cultures engaged in the transformation of the rural landscape.This paper applies the creative destruction model to Xidi Village, a world heritage destination in Anhui,China. Xidi Village is an ideal destination to implement the creative destruction model because it satisfies the three premises described by Mitchell: it is accessible to a large affluent population(Shanghai and Suzhou); some heritage elements were in existence before commodification began; and an entrepreneurial spirit existed. This paper uses qualitative research to collect data on investments,tourist numbers and resident attitudes and reveals that Xidi is in the model's third stage(advanced commodification), which is maintained because of the government's forward- looking interventions.This third stage cannot achieve theequilibriumstate that Mitchell(1998) described for the model's second and final stages. However, Xidi exhibits different equilibrium characteristics than those described by Mitchell. In reaching this equilibrium state, the local public sector in Xidi resisted outside investments and limited the local residents' commercial behavior to curtail rapid and pernicious commodification. Moreover, they used tourism income to improve the infrastructure and village landscape, thus satisfying both the local residents and the tourists. The local public sector also planned a new district located outside the old village to situate new investment and government agencies. In contrast to Mitchell's study, the local people in Xidi have never expressed a desire to relocate, both because of the economic benefits that tourism offers them and because of their emotional attachment to the village. Moreover, there has not been an influx of new residents from large cities because the public service in Xidi Village are less developed. This paper asserts that as one of the model's drivers, the local government's attitude in the third stage will determine whether the creative destruction model will progress to its subsequent/advanced stages. This paper proposes a modification to the creative destruction model for China's historic towns and villages. The modification focuses on the role of the local public sector, the state of equilibrium and the attitudes of local residents. The findings should be beneficial to other communities that base their development on the marketing of small-town heritage.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.