Tourism in the Coastal Zone: Perspectives from Hainan, P.R. China

Tourism is too important to be left to tourism spe-cialists. There are a number of reasons for this. First, while one can debate whether or not tourism is an in-dustry, there is widespread recognition that tourism is fragmented among many varied operations of differ-ing sizes and with different products. These include transportation, attractions, accommodations, food and beverage suppliers, and souvenir producers and their outlets to name a few. Furthermore, much tourism training has a relatively narrow focus upon hospitali-ty, i.e. hotel and catering management, to the relative neglect of other aspects of tourism. To complicate matters further, tourism is a phenomenon which has links to many other sectors of the economy and many tourism issues are not solely tourism problems but involve relationships with agriculture, forestry, min-ing, environmental protection and a host of other ac-tivities which compete for scarce resources of land, labour, capital, energy, waste assimilation capacity and the like. Thus, it is important to consider tourism in relation to these other phenomena: a narrow focus is unlikely to be able to do justice to the wide variety of interrelated concerns. It also follows that policies designed to sustain tourism may not necessarily con-tribute to sustainable development more broadly con-ceived for the perpetuation of tourism may not always be in the broader, long-term, interest (Wall 1997).