Abstract：Xi'an is one of the most important tourism cities in China, and it enjoys high international reputation in the world. Recently, local government has put forward constructing an international metropolis as a main goal, but the statistics show that the inbound tourism flow size in Xi'an is far from the standard of the international metropolis and its "reversed pareto principle" characteristics of inbound tourism market don't accord the "pareto principle" features of the inbound tourism market of China. Obviously, this means that more than 80 percent of inbound tourists of Xi'an accounts for a small part of inbound tourists of China. Therefore, solving the problem of "reversed pareto principle" is very important for the development of inbound tourism in Xi'an. Using the relevant data from the survey of inbound tourists, this study presents a quantitative method to analysis the "reversed pareto principle" inbound tourism market of Xi'an with the methodologies derived from the social network analysis, which offers numerous techniques and indicators through measuring the links among nodes to demonstrate the structural patterns of connected systems. The result shows that:1) the relationship of inbound tourism flow among Xi 'An, Shanghai and Beijing are more closer than those among Xi 'An, Guangzhou and Hong Kong; 2) Xi'an is not only a core inbound tourism destination, but also a significant distribution center of inbound tourism flow in China and an important "second-hand inbound tourism source" of Guilin, Chengdu and Kunming; 3) the relationships of inbound tourism flow between Xi 'An and other major domestic tourism cities are disequilibrium, and the inbound tourism market of Xi'an highly relies on the inbound tourism market of Beijing and Shanghai and the source of inbound tourism flow of Xi'an is not abundance.
