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Abstract
Rural China has faced considerable challenges in recent decades, leading to the dissolution of many state-owned forest farm communities and threatening sustainable development. There remains a need to understand the drivers and characteristics associated with these changes, including the influence of rural tourism on combating forest recession. This study addresses these concerns by constructing and applying a regional sociology framework to investigate the link between tourism and the evolution of communities in rural forested areas. Focusing on forest farm communities in central China, recent findings indicate that tourism has complicated social relations, leading to a transformation of identity from a predominantly status-based, industrial, and cultural identity to a comprehensive regional identity. The study aims to enrich tourism and identity theory, providing theoretical and practical guidance for understanding and enhancing forest community development and sustainability through rural tourism in China and elsewhere.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Chunyan Zhang
Dr. Chunyan Zhang is Assistant Professor in Tourism Management and Human Geography at Central China Normal University in the city of Wuhan. She received her Ph.D. in Tourism Management from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. Her research interests are focused on tourism geography and sociology of tourism.
David W. Knight
Dr. David W. Knight is Assistant Professor and Center for Collaborative Conservation Fellow at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, USA. His tourism research and consulting efforts emphasize local interests, strategic tourism governance and rural-indigenous empowerment in destinations around the world.
Yajuan Li
Dr. Yajuan Li is Associate Professor in Tourism Management at Central China Normal University in the city of Wuhan. She earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Science, and is specifically interested in rural tourism and livelihood research in southwest China.
Yi Zhou
Yi Zhou is a graduate student tutored by Dr. Chunyan Zhang, majoring in Human Geography at Central China Normal University. Her research focuses primarily on tourism geography and rural geography.
Meng Zhou
Meng Zhou is a Ph.D. student in Tourism Management at Dalian University of Technology in the city of Dalian. His main research interests lie in tourism geography and rural tourism.
Minggui Zi
Minggui Zi is a graduate student supervised by Dr. Chunyan Zhang, majoring in Human Geography at Central China Normal University in the city of Wuhan. His main interests include tourism geography and sociology of tourism.