Challenges and Future of Tourism Research in China: From the Prolificacy to the Tourism Indiscipline

In the last decades, epistemologists in tourism fields alerted on the problem of knowledge fragmentation as well as the lack of autonomy of a discipline which failed to agree on an all-encompassing definition of what tourism means. This thorny question remains open to date. No less true was that China has grown over the recent decades to become in economic power, for some analysts, even displacing the US from its hegemonic place. Chinese universities have situated at the top of already established academic ranking such a QS or the higher education. In this vein, tourism seems not to be an exemption. This chapter deals with the rise and expansion of Chinese scholars in tourism-related studies as well as their main limitations at the time of conducting applied-research. This chapter discusses to what extent Chinese academicians echoed the original vices Westerners failed to resolve. Meanwhile, we lay the foundations for a new epistemology of tourism in Asia. The dissociation between the Academy and (echoing John Tribe) the dispersion of knowledge is not been assessed by Chinese scholars. To some extent, such an omission replicates the same vices of tourism-research in English speaking countries. I am not Asian nor Chinese, so to speak I would not be an authoritative voice in these types of themes. However, as anthropology historically showed the ethnic and linguistic difference allows the ethnographer to focus on the problem with a new fresh perspective the native overlooked.