Abstract The study of tourism in Chinese universities has a history of approximately thirty years, but could we have foretold the nature of the industry in 2012 in about 1980, a period prior to the existence of the internet and the impacts of information technologies on marketing, image distribution and the use of knowledge management systems in the tourism industry? How then might tourism appear by 2050? This paper identifies drivers of tourist demand and supply; drivers that include economic growth, population growth and age distribution, climate change and the potential impacts of post peak oil production. Using information from the ‘Tourist Futures’ scenario building project funded in New Zealand and the work of Yeomans, it reduces these drivers to two primary dimensions, the continua of resource adequacy or deficiency, and political co-operation or rivalry to draw a matrix of four cells. As an example it briefly describes one of those cells as it was applied to New Zealand, the cell of ‘eco-paradise’. This has implications for China in that it envisages a scenario where conservation or environment and culture is deemed important to the point where quotas are imposed on visitor numbers and licenses and permits are required to be purchased by tourists prior to their visit. Nonetheless tourism will continue to grow as new technologies permit the duplication of the natural in urban centers that represent a nexus of leisure, recreation, retail, work and tourism activities, and where new generations oriented toward urban leisure and information technology feel at ease. Nonetheless the needs of business and a desire to see new places, and new emergent tourism markets allied to new aircraft and airport technologies plus new life patterns of the global worker will still lead to mass movements of people across the world, but much of this movement will be between growing mega cities. One implication for tourism researchers will be a need to locate tourism studies within wider socio-technological contexts and urban planning, and to envisage tourism as part of the entertainment and leisure industries, and not simply as an activity divorced from these arenas of human activity.
2012, Vol. 27 
