Coupling Coordination between Cultural Heritage Protection and Tourism Development: The Case of China

The systems of cultural heritage protection and tourism development are intertwined, so enhancing the coupling coordination status between them is beneficial to stimulate their growth. This study first constructs the theoretical coupling coordination mechanism and explores the assessment structure with detailed indicators to explore their coordinated interactions. Moreover, it selects the provincial regions of China as the case study to compare the temporal and spatial variations of both systems’ growth statuses and their coupling coordination status. Moreover, it provides beneficial insights for different regions to enhance cultural heritage protection and tourism development with coordinated and differentiated approaches based on dynamic predictions. We find that for the coupling coordination status, the temporal fluctuations of the regions were mild and aggregated, and it is rare to find obvious exceptions. Moreover, the spatial distributions exhibit apparent geographical correlations, with distributions being “higher in the coastal, central, and southwestern areas”. This study boasts several novelties. First, we select multiple regions for comparison, which offsets previous research gaps focusing only on individual regions. What is more, we construct the coupling coordination mechanism with an assessment structure and indicators, which theoretically explains their interactive correlations and explores the evaluation approaches. Moreover, we predict the temporal and spatial changes of the coupling coordination status and provide differentiated suggestions, which could contribute to the future coordinated development of different regions