The green development path towards building a strong tourism country
2026-06-16
The 15th Five Year Plan period is a strategic decisive period for China to move from a tourism powerhouse to a tourism powerhouse. Unlike previous emphasis on infrastructure investment and market expansion, the core of this stage is to reconstruct the underlying logic of tourism development with the concept of ecological civilization, and promote the green transformation from technological repair to systematic reshaping. The path to building a strong tourism country lies in standing at the height of harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, exploring a high-quality development path that prioritizes ecology, is green and low-carbon. This requires us to shift from the development of scattered scenic spots to systematic planning, conservation, and value transformation of national ecological and cultural resources, with the goal of building a comprehensive and networked high-quality recreational space system.
The tension between ecological protection and tourism development
In recent years, China has made significant progress in the construction of ecological civilization. The national park system is steadily advancing, the ecological protection red line system is fully implemented, and the integrated protection and systematic governance of mountains, waters, forests, fields, lakes, grasses, and sands are showing initial results. The ecological environment of numerous nature reserves continues to improve, biodiversity conservation has achieved fruitful results, and the concept of green development is increasingly deeply rooted in people's hearts. On this basis, some regions have explored preliminary paths for realizing the value of ecological products, and the coordinated development of ecology and tourism shows positive prospects.
However, there is still a certain tension between ecological protection and tourism development in grassroots industrial practice, mainly reflected in three aspects. Firstly, in terms of value transformation, ecological resource rich areas highly overlap with economically underdeveloped areas, and some places are prone to the dilemma of a binary choice between protection and development under the pressure of poverty alleviation. Traditional development path dependence still exists, and the mechanism for transforming ecological value into economic value still needs to be improved. Secondly, in terms of spatial control, the current governance system lacks a refined dynamic monitoring mechanism for carrying capacity. Large scale passenger flows during peak tourism seasons may exceed ecological thresholds, leading to risks such as vegetation degradation and water pollution; At the same time, the regulation of rigid space use needs to be strengthened, and development activities sometimes occupy ecologically sensitive areas. The effectiveness of implementing ecological protection red lines needs to be further improved. Thirdly, in terms of tourism experience, some ecotourism products have obvious homogenization, with shallow consumption outweighing deep ecological education. Tourist experience emphasizes sensory stimulation, and the driving role of ecological civilization practice needs to be strengthened.
Green development from resource utilization to value symbiosis
To overcome the above dilemma, a profound paradigm shift must be carried out in theoretical logic. Traditional tourism development follows a linear logic of resources, products, and benefits, with ecology viewed as a raw material that can be extracted; The underlying logic of green development should be ecological ontology, which acknowledges that the ecosystem itself is a community of life with subjective value.
The first connotation of the logic of ecological civilization is the red line. This does not mean giving up development for the sake of protection, but establishing environmental carrying capacity as an insurmountable rigid constraint. For example, in the process of building an international ecological tourism destination, Qinghai Province has innovatively established a three certificate mechanism of birth permit, birth certificate, and health certificate, conducted strict ecological assessments on the construction scale of all tourism facilities, and established the principle that any development must comply with protection. This institutional design internalizes environmental pressures into operational guidelines, forcing industries to transition towards low-carbon.
The second connotation of the logic of ecological civilization is value co creation. To transform green mountains and clear waters into golden and silver mountains, we cannot rely on the physical realization of exhausting resources, but should rely on the chemical catalysis of institutional innovation. The carbon sequestration tourism model launched by Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park provides a good example: tourists can offset travel carbon emissions by purchasing forestry carbon sinks, or adopt carbon fixing tree species to participate in ecological restoration. In this mode, tourists transform from consumers of the environment to guardians, and ecological value is added value and feedback through market mechanisms. This is a symbiotic model that goes beyond the simple ticket economy.
Building a collaborative development path between government, industry, and society
Based on the above logic, promoting the construction of a tourism powerhouse should establish a multi-party collaborative governance system, with the core being to orderly transform the positive externalities of ecological protection into endogenous development drivers for all parties through clear delineation of rights and responsibilities and incentive mechanisms.
In terms of administrative governance, transition from being a merchant to a guardian and supplier. The role of the government should shift from being a single investor to a guardian of national ecological security barriers, a manager of high-quality ecological assets, and a planner and supplier of high-quality public recreational spaces. The key to this transformation lies in establishing rigid ecological space development boundaries, just like strictly adhering to the red line of farmland and ecological protection. On the one hand, strict implementation of ecological space use control, establishment of a negative list for franchise access, and strict delineation of the boundaries between ecological conservation areas and low disturbance recreational areas. On the other hand, we will increase the supply of green public goods, and plan the public recreation network systems such as scenic roads, greenways, heritage corridors that cover urban and rural areas and connect mountains and rivers as a whole. Its ultimate goal is to ensure that the most precious natural and cultural resources can be matched with the most sustainable operation, while achieving the preservation and appreciation of state-owned resource assets, and laying a solid institutional and spatial foundation for the construction of a tourism powerhouse.
At the level of industrial upgrading, there is a transformation from ticket economy to co creation of operation, landscape, and value. Faced with the diminishing marginal benefits of the "ticket economy", market entities should break the path dependence on simple monetization of resources. Represented by world natural heritage sites such as Meili Snow Mountain and Jinfo Mountain, enterprises should shift their focus to operating a carefully preserved landscape and a route full of stories. By deeply cultivating high value-added services such as ecological education and natural research, and relying on core carriers such as national parks and national botanical gardens, a modern ecological product value transformation path is constructed to transform the ecological value of "green mountains and clear waters" into products with high-end premium capabilities, achieving a leap in the value chain.
In terms of social mobilization, transition from bystanders to protagonists and empathizers. For the destination community, identity reshaping needs to be achieved through institutionalized interest linkage mechanisms. In the model of Azhike Village in Yunnan, villagers invest in resources and receive dividends based on ecological management performance, transforming from participants at the end of the industrial chain to owners and beneficiaries of development. For tourists, tourism activities should go beyond simple sensory pleasure and internalize intangible tourism and low-carbon travel as conscious responsible consumption behaviors. When the protection of community residents and the responsibility of tourists form a positive interaction, it injects the deepest endogenous driving force into the construction of a tourism powerhouse.
Ultimately, the goal of building a tourism powerhouse is to achieve harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, and to contribute to the sustainable development of the Chinese nation. Standing at the new starting point of the 15th Five Year Plan, we should deeply recognize that the strength of tourism lies in the synergistic enhancement of ecological competitiveness, cultural soft power, and social cohesion. Through the reshaping of the logic of ecological civilization and the firm practice of green development path, we not only aim to create a batch of world-class tourism attractions, but also aim to systematically build a high-quality national recreational system that prioritizes ecology, is shared by the whole nation, and is sustainably utilized. This goes beyond the scope of an industry and concerns the overall construction of a beautiful China. The majority of philosophy and social science workers and colleagues in the industry should join hands, take ecology as the foundation and culture as the soul, and jointly contribute to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation with Chinese path to modernization. (Outlook New Era)
Author: Cai Xiaomei (Professor at the School of Economics and Management, South China Normal University, and Executive Director of the Research Center for Ecological Civilization and Green Governance)
Edit:Luoyu Responsible editor:Jiajia
Source:cssn.cn
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