Patrimonialisation de la nature et dynamiques touristiques : spécificités et singularités d’un « modèle » chinois contemporain

Several years of studying the relationships between heritage of nature and tourism in Western civilisation had bring us to the observation of a phenomenon of co-constitution, similar to the one noticed with the heritage of culture. The reason is the importance of the external non-utilitarian gaze of the spectator, which is contemporary of the birth of a new way of travelling: the pleasure trip. In order to know if the essential link that had participated to define the heritage of nature in Western civilisation and more especially in France, is part of a universal process favoured by the actual moment of the globalization, we had to compare it to the situation in other countries, developing recently tourism. China, that has a specific relation to nature for being the oldest landscape civilisation of the world and that is increasing massively its domestic tourism, opens this investigation. This comparative analysis will give us the opportunity to observe that the correlation between tourism and heritage of nature exists indeed in China, like in France, but doesn’t erase the local specificities. It recovers from a phenomenon of co-constitution defined between universalism and cultural, economic and social singularities