The global outbreak of the COVID-19 makes mainland China inbound tourism development path which has been stagnant for a long time more tough. However, the COVID-19 will be defeated by human beings in the end, and inbound tourism development will still be an important aspect of mainland China tourism. Under this background, it is urgent to carry out a prospective study on the recovery path of mainland China inbound tourism demand in the post epidemic era to realize the revival of mainland China inbound tourism demand quickly and seek the possibility of corner overtaking. For this aim, conducting the empirical study on mainland China inbound tourism demand is the premise of the normative research. Only through the effective identification of new inbound tourism demand determinants can we provide more targeted guidance for promoting the development of mainland China inbound tourism. Although the empirical studies on mainland China inbound tourism demand determinants have been a hot topic in academic circles, there is lack of practical issues orientation and indigenous exploration. More studies are just the simple transplantation and the reduplicate of similar designs abroad. Those heavily imitation-oriented empirical studies are not conducive to draw original conclusions, and the Chinese academic international influence and discourse power will be damaged to some extent. Moreover, they can not provide effective guidance for the heterogenous and deep problems found in mainland China inbound tourism development. In view of this, this dissertation does not follow the above approach. Instead, started with the phenomenon of the explicit national cultural conflict between mainland China and the European and American countries (regions) since the outbreak of the COVID-19, and taking the problem of the imbalance structure of mainland China inbound tourism origin region which may lead to the low annual growth rate of mainland China inbound tourism into consideration, a proposition of national cultural conflict may be an important determinant hindering the revival of mainland China inbound tourism demand in the post epidemic era is proposed. The purpose is to reveal the possible impact of national cultural conflict on mainland China inbound tourism demand and its internal mechanism.
After searching the literature, it is found that national cultural conflict has not yet become a popular academic term, and there is barely no researches studying its effect on mainland China inbound tourism demand. This may make this dissertation somewhat groundbreaking. However, it may also mean a lot of risks and challenges when complete the literature review, theoretical framework, hypothesis demonstration, data acquisition and empirical parts and many other related works. Based on the principle of making hypothesis boldly and verifying carefully and the usual approach of empirical researches, three core questions are put forward: (1) whether national cultural conflict has a significant negative impact on mainland China inbound tourism demand? (2) do national cultural conflict’s dimensions have different effects on mainland China inbound tourism demand? (3) how does national cultural conflict affect mainland China inbound tourism demand? The first two questions belong to the existence test of the effect, and the third one belongs to the exploration of influence mechanism. The first two questions consist of the basis of the third question while the third one is the extension of them.
In order to find the answer to above questions, the basic paradigm combining theoretical methods with empirical methods is adopted. Except Chapter 1 Introduction and Chapter 7 Conclusions and Policy Recommendations, the main content consists of five progressive parts (i.e., Chapter 2 to 6) in logic, which are treated as five chapters of the paper. The method strategies used are qualitative methods, quantitative methods and interdisciplinary methods. The second and third chapters belong to the theoretical researches. Through the definition of core concepts, basic theory research, relevant literature review and theoretical impact analysis, hypotheses concerning the impact of national cultural conflict on mainland China inbound tourism demand are proposed, which lays the foundation for subsequent empirical researches. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters belongs to empirical researches aiming at testing above hypotheses. Based on the international arrivals data of 66 major origin regions of mainland China from 2002 to 2018 gathered from the Yearbook of Tourism Statistics issued by the UNWTO and the methods of pooled least squares estimation (Pooled OLS), random effect model (RE), LM test, and robust test, the impact of national cultural conflict on Chinese mainland inbound tourism demand and its heterogeneity in different subsamples are identified in chapter four. The impact of national cultural conflict’s dimensions (i.e., power distance conflict, individualism conflict, masculine conflict and uncertainty avoidance conflict) on mainland China inbound tourism demand are explored in the total sample and subsamples (i.e., different regions, different purposes, different genders and different ages) in chapter five and the Hausman-Taylor estimation is adopted for robust test. Cultural identity, national image and political relation are considered to be mediate variables and their meditation effects are tested by using the panel data estimation strategies (i.e., Pooled OLS, RE, LM test) and the meditation methods (i.e., stepwise test and Sobel test) in the total sample and European group in chapter six.
The results indicate that: (1) national cultural conflict has a significant negative effect on mainland China inbound tourism demand, and the effect has the characteristic of heterogeneity in different region, purpose, gender and age groups; (2) in groups of sightseeing and leisure, service staff, and other, the female group, groups of 15-24 years old and 25-44 years old, power distance conflict has a significant negative effect on mainland China inbound tourism demand; (3) in European group, groups of conference/business, sightseeing and leisure, service staff, and other, groups of male and female, all age groups, individualism conflict has a significant negative effect on mainland China inbound tourism demand; (4) in the Asian and Pacific group, the conference/business group, masculine conflict has a significant negative effect on mainland China inbound tourism demand; (5) cultural identity and political relationship have incomplete mediation effect. Precisely, national cultural conflict has a significant negative impact on cultural identity and political relationship while cultural identity and political relationship have a significant positive impact on mainland China inbound tourism demand. National image is not the mediator when national cultural conflict impacts mainland China inbound tourism demand; (6) institution quality, income of the origin region, contiguous dummy variable, common race, and World Exposition of Shanghai in 2010 have a significant positive effect on mainland China inbound tourism demand; (7) cultural distance, common language, common religion and SARS in 2003 have a significant negative effect on mainland China inbound tourism demand.
Above results reveal the effect of national cultural conflict and its dimensions on mainland China inbound tourism demand, the mechanism of the effect of national cultural conflict on mainland China inbound tourism demand, and conventional factors’ effects on mainland China inbound tourism demand. The enlightenment to the mainland China inbound tourism development is that more attention should be paid to the different roles of national cultural conflict, cultural identity, political relationship and institution quality in the mainland China inbound tourism development. Mainland China inbound tourism demand could be increased through reducing national cultural conflict, enhancing cultural identity, improving political relationship and institution quality. Based on this, taking into account crucial problems of the culture, marketing and supply in the mainland China inbound tourism development, three aspects of specific suggestions are proposed: (1) implementing the overseas promotion strategy of Chinese culture vigorously; (2) carrying out precise marketing by means of market segmentation; (3) focusing on the improvement of weakness from the inbound tourism supply side.
There are possible five aspects of innovation efforts in this dissertation: (1) it provides a preliminary viable approach for the measurement of the abstract concept, i.e., national cultural conflict on the basis of the innovative application of Hofstede’s national culture theory; (2) it finds out the possible effect of national cultural conflict on mainland China inbound tourism demand by means of empirical researches; (3) it explores further the effect of national cultural conflict’s dimensions (i.e., power distance conflict, individualism conflict, masculinity conflict and uncertainty avoidance conflict) on mainland China inbound tourism demand; (4) it reveals the internal mechanism of the effect of national cultural conflict on mainland China inbound tourism demand for the first time; (5) it not only uses the authoritative statistical data provided by the UNWTO, the UN Comtrade Database, the UN General Assembly Voting Data and so on, but also uses the relatively frontier econometrical methods.
There may be three aspects of limitations in this dissertation: (1) national cultural conflict is a time-invariant independent variable which means the fixed effect model and the related estimation methods can not be adopted. Therefore, endogenous problems caused by the correlation between national cultural conflict and individual effects may exist to some extent; (2) in fact, this dissertation belongs to a case study. The conclusions are specific which means their universality are limited and needs further test; (3) there is still room for further improvement in the use of research methods.
In the future, this study can be deepened from three aspects: (1) other measurement methods of national cultural conflict should be explored such as making national cultural conflict a time-variant variable, finding proper instrumental variables for it, and using the FE estimation in order to make the coefficient more accurate; (2) more similar case studies as well as a research on the worldwide should be conducted to bring to general conclusions; (3) the conclusion of this study could be further supported by using the qualitative research methods such as the questionnaire survey, in-depth interview, case study and grounded theory.
The value of this study mainly includes: (1) it not only analyzes the effect of national cultural conflict on mainland China inbound tourism demand and its internal mechanism theoretically, but also conducts the empirical research to test hypotheses. Based on these work, the negative impact of national cultural conflict on mainland China inbound tourism demand is identified, as well as the mediation effect of cultural identity and political relationship. The mediating role of the system. To a certain extent, it can promote the researches concerning inbound tourism demand determinants, enrich and develop the existing theoretical framework of tourism demand, and reveal the correlation between culture and economy further; (2) from a practical perspective, this study provides new management perspectives and approaches for the recovery and development of mainland China inbound tourism demand in the post epidemic era, which also have some enlightenment and references for other destinations in the world.
