Cultural Differences and Tourism Planning

Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, Professor Wu Bihu. Welcome to the session of overview of tourism planning. Today, we have great honor to invite Professor Wu to come to us. Professor Wu has engaged in tourism planning for more than 30 years. He has contributed a lot to tourism theory and also he had a lot of experience in tourism planning. At the same time, Professor Wu is a very famous consulting expert in tourism policy. So today, I believe we will benefit a lot from this interview. Now come to my first question. Last year, as we know, our National Tourism Administration was incorporated into the Ministry of Culture. It indicates that culture plays a rucial role in tourism planning.

So from perspective of culture, what’s the difference between China and west country? And how this cultural difference impacts tourism development? Yes. Thank you for your question. I think I don’t care and we don’t mind the structure of the government to manage or to administrate tourism and culture in different places, in different buildings or in the same buildings. Last year, China government shrank the size of the government. So, we put the Tourism Administration and the Ministry of Culture together. So we reorganized the structure as one Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

So as a country like China that all the tourism resources are in the hand of government, so when the two different departments work together or they have the offices in the same building, so that it gives us a very good opportunity. In the past, we worked or managed the cultural relics resources or the heritages in the Department of Cultural Relics, and we put the tourism in another hand of China National Tourism Administration.

So after the reform of the government in culture and tourism, we have more opportunities to let people sit down around one table and discuss the best way to find the management to preserve the heritage and also offer more convenient, better ways of tourism experience in those cultural heritage. As you know, China is a country that may be the only country that has a long history for more than 5,000 years and also the history has never been stopped by different major nationalities. So that means China has a long history, but also very rich cultural heritage. You have the opportunity to visit the recognized world cultural attractions in many places in China.

But the management or the development of tourism and culture was in two different system before. But when the two systems emerged as one system, we have more opportunities to get better tourism experience in those cultural heritage sites. Another aspect of the question is that when we find we will have more opportunities to engage or to visit more cultural tourism attractions with more rich er experience of culture, we have more opportunities to experience more culture in deep demonstration ways or something like that. We should notice that cultural protection and the use of cultural heritage is quite different between the Asian way and the European way.

Because as you know, many cultural heritages, old buildings made in European countries by stone, like in Rome, in Greece or in the Scotland. The buildings were made by stone. But in China, we have the very famous or the grand buildings made by clay and wood. That means during every one hundred year or something like that, the buildings will be ruined or broken or disappeared, or destroyed by the fire something like that. So we want to rebuild those cultural heritages again and again. So I think the principle is the same.

We want to preserve the culture heritages, but the technology or the way to demonstrate or to show the culture to the visitors from abroad and from local people is quite different. I think we should notice that difference between the west and the east. Thank you.