Tourism development and cultural policies in China

As China actively pursues modernization, the tensions among a rigid application of socialism, the conservatism of tradition, and the demands of economic development threaten to destabilize the nation. All three elemental forces have contradictory objectives and the Chinese Communist Party expends significant effort in attempts to reconcile those differences. Tourism has emerged as an effective vehicle for synthesizing some of the differences through its contribution to the modernization process, its utilization of heritage for product development, and its role in meeting some socialist objectives. Tourism in China has thus exerted a centripetal influence, lessening to some extent tensions among the three opposing forces