China’s Village Tourism Committees: A Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Xi Jinping has set the goal of eliminating rural poverty in China by 2020. One critical component if this target is to be achieved is the effectiveness of village tourist committees, and the article reports findings from a study of social networks and their operation in five Shandong villages. Using both thematic and social network analysis, the networks are shown to be diffuse and dependent on familial circles and wider guanxi possessed by key actors. However, the findings indicate how these networks are being extended beyond the village into the higher echelons of provincial administration while also illustrating the importance of socio-biological ties as defined by Hamilton, Fennell, and others.

Keywords

China rural tourism social network analysis

Introduction

Rural tourism is a growing and significant industry in many countries and regions. Indeed, in a country such as China, rural tourism has been endorsed by the central government as a means of addressing rural poverty. China’s 13th five-year plan (2016–2020) highlights the China government’s pledge to strengthen its support to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers to ensure sustained increase in rural incomes. Accordingly, rural tourism is not only perceived as a means of increasing incomes but also a means of modernizing business practice by better connecting farmers to the market, improving rural infrastructure and turning farm products into various service products. In addition, it promotes work opportunities and cultural exchange. Consequently, provincial and local administrations are continually seeking means by which to obtain the desired goals of additional income and employment generation in the countryside.

This article focuses on village-level destination marketing organizations (DMOs) or village tourism committees (VTCs) within the Chinese Province of Shandong because it is these that are tasked with driving the government agenda of modernization. For many years, village-based DMOs have been the primary marketing organizations in China’s domestic tourism industry, but many are small in size and simply structured bodies, possibly having limited vision yet remaining close to their communities. Additionally, village DMOs differ from large-sized organizations by being more reliant on guanxi instead of rules. Despite the increasing dependency on semi–state-owned enterprises as described by P. Li, Ryan, and Cave (2016), these village committees retain influence, particularly when headed by charismatic local politicians. Therefore, this study examined the following two questions: (a) What are the nature of the village DMO’s social network? and (b) How does a village DMO’s social network impact on its effectiveness? These questions possess importance as such village dynamics may eventually determine the success of Xi Jinping’s policy to eliminate poverty in China’s rural areas by 2020.

The study used mixed methods research involving direct observation by living in Shandong for six months over the research period, by undertaking 57 formal interviews and then using social network analysis across five case study sites. As a note, the terms “destination marketing organization” (DMO) and “village tourism committee” (VTC) are used interchangeably within the article. The use of the term VTC is to distinguish it from the generally western usage of the term DMO because, in China, the village committee may well organize much more than marketing messages, branding, and promotion and be involved in the allocation of rights to households to be involved in tourism in specified ways.

The next section of the article—the literature review—introduces the concept of social network analysis and indicates its purposes and applications. After that, the context of the study is described along with the research methods adopted. Finally, the results of the research are described and their implications discussed.

Literature Review

The differences in China’s regions, resources, topography, cultural assets, and village sizes have meant that Chinese rural tourism possesses both diversity and fragmentation in its offering, branding, and marketing. The size of the villages, the numbers of people involved in tourism all differ, and the patterns of relationships within village DMO also vary. In some villages, the respective committees are well organized, and in others less so. Differences exist in terms of social and financial capital.

A significant literature on DMOs exists in the western academic literature. They have been described as being primarily marketing organizations and providers of visitor services, with little actual power to plan development (Gretzel 2000). A DMO is therefore an agency responsible for the marketing of an identifiable tourism destination with an exact geopolitical boundary (Pike and Page 2014). Many, through membership schemes, pool the marketing resources of the public and private sectors to achieve a greater advertising impact than might otherwise be the case (Gretzel 2000). It has been noted that DMOs and regional tourism organizations (RTOs) are shifting from being simply bureaucratic government departments into roles as private sector promotional cooperatives, public-private partnerships (PPPs) involving funding from government, or as QUANGOs (quasi-government bodies) funded by government but not directly run as part of a government as in, for example, Australia and the USA (Morrison et al. 1995; Pike and Page 2014). Hence DMOs try to become less dependent on public funding (Pike and Page 2014).

Similar patterns exist within China. The Chinese village DMO has a legal status and responsibilities to each village. In that sense, it has a specific geopolitical boundary. From the social network perspective, part of the tourism network is the relationship between the village DMO and its impact on the provincial DMO, so there are links and a field of influence extending beyond the village boundary. An effective village DMO is one that has authority not only within its village but is also helping to shape provincial policies. This remains an interactive process as, in China, governmental influence if not control remains manifest in village tourism policies (P. Li, Ryan, and Cave 2016).

Whether in China or other countries, the DMO’s effectiveness thus depends in part on its abilities to generate networks into the public and private domains, and into domestic and international markets. The latter often requires mobilization of networks beyond the geographical location of the DMO itself. Social network research analyzes the social structures and relationships between actors in the network (Borgatti and Molina 2003). Notable scholars in the social network field include White (2007) and his New Economic Sociology, Granovetter’s (1973) theories of strong tie strengths and weak tie power, and Burt’s (1992) concept of structure holes among others (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Definition of Social Networks by Different Schools.

Schools	Authors	Definition	Key Points
New Economic Sociology	Harrison White (1976)	“Networks of several distinct types of social tie are aggregated by a dual model that partitions a population while simultaneously identifying patterns of relations.” (p. 730)	The “knittedness” of interconnections within a network, being consistent with the paths in a single network.
Theory of Tie Strengths	Mark Granovetter (1973)	“The strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” (p. 1361)	Strength of weak ties: weak ties are more likely to link members of different small groups than are strong ones, which tend to be concentrated within particular groups.
Social Resources Theory	Lin Nan (2001)	“Capital is as investment of resources with expected returns in the marketplace.” (p. 3)	Capital is captured in social relations and that its capture evokes structural constraints and opportunities as well as actions and choices on the part of the actors.
Structural Holes Theory	Ronald Burt (1992)	“A structure hole is a relationship of nonredundancy between two contacts.” (p. 18)	The holes between non- redundant connections provide opportunities that can enhance both the control benefits and the information advantages of networks.

Source: White (1975); Granovetter (1973); Lin Nan (2001); Burt (1992).

In these theoretical constructs, the essential elements of social network analysis are nodes and lines, where nodes represent actors and lines represent relational aspects between participants. Together nodes and lines form a link diagram. The actors can be an individual, organization, or family. Social network analysis aims to identify these relationships, and the impact of these relationships on both individuals and the network as a whole (Newman 2003). Network analysis documents how patterns of ties are used to allocate resources in a social structure. Consequently, important variables within any network depends on positioning (is an actor central or peripheral to the network), the flow of information and its direction (who primarily disseminates information to whom), the speed of information dissemination (the intensity of networks), and of course the effectiveness of the network in formulating and achieving consensual goals.

Associated with social network analysis (SNA) is actor network theory (ANT) that concerns itself with telling stories about “how” relations assemble or do not (Law 2009). This means that the researcher is not so much interested in what tourism is, but in how tourism works, how it is assembled, enacted, and ordered (Duim, Ren, and Jóhannesson 2012). Law (2009) considers that ANT is a “material semiotics” multiple: a diaspora that overlaps with other intellectual traditions. ANT reflects the chains that give rise to natural and social realities, realities that can only be understood as stabilized sets of relations and which permit the construction of centres and peripheries, insiders and outsider, humans and nonhumans, nature and society, and so on (Murdoch 1997). Beritelli and Laesser (2011) identify a relevant network of actors and their individual influence reputations (independent variables) as important power dimensions (dependent variables) and further indicate that the interpretation of influence and power varies across stakeholder groups. Hence they suggest networks must be regarded as a perceptual and not only a structural concept. Obviously, ANT provides for a nondualistic and symmetrical perspective concerning the ordering, materiality, and multiplicity of DMOs’ relationships when studying case studies.

As an interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary method from its inception (Knoke and Yang 2008), SNA has been used to analyze leisure and recreation behavior (Stokowski 1990) but has only infrequently been applied to tourism research. In the 1980s, scholars used this paradigm in travel resource management studies (Allen 2000). In the following decade, SNA was used more in tourism research and examples include work on tourism policy networks (Tyler and Dinan 2001; Dredge 2006; Pforr 2002, 2004, 2006; Liu, Tzeng, and Lee 2012), tourism destination networks (Pavlovich 2003; Scott, Cooper, and Baggio 2008; Shih 2006), and tourism business networks (Dabphet, Scott, and Ruhanen 2012). Indeed, the work of Pforr (2002) and Dredge (2006) has been specifically about the role of destination marketing and promotion.

Consequently, it can be concluded that the concept is established in the western literature, but what of China? There are some studies of DMOs in China in the English language literature. For example, Y. Wang and Bramwell (2012) considered the power and influence of different actors in governance, strategic selection of policy choices, and questioned whether views about policies exhibited a uniform hegemony among powerful and less influential groups. D. Wang, Li, and Li (2013) provided a short description of the role of tourism marketing actors in the development of China’s smart tourism policies. Yang and Wang (2015) analyzed the web pages of Chinese DMOs and noted a need to better engage with followers on the web pages as the DMOs rarely made blog postings. In fact, X. Li and Wang (2010) had come to a much similar conclusion in a study of the use of social media by Chinese DMOs just five years earlier. However, the current socioeconomic and political settings of China make it almost impossible to completely apply the principles of western-styled community participation to the practices of tourism development in China’s rural areas, and taking local contexts into account is critical (Ying and Zhou 2007). In the Chinese language literature, a number of studies exist that utilize social network analysis. Not surprisingly they can be found in the medical field with studies of avian flu (e.g., Martin et al. 2011) and sexual diseases (Choi et al. 2007). More specifically, there are studies of spatial systems analysis with tourist destinations in China such as that of Huang et al. (2012), but these studies seemingly remain few, and almost none are undertaken at the village level.

The study is justified on the grounds that if China is to achieve its goal of rural development in harmonious ways, it is essential to understand the “on the ground realities” of village tourism initiatives. The study also highlights some of the dynamics of Chinese rural political realities and characteristics.

The Context of the Study

According to Butler’s (1980) tourist area life-cycle framework, a destination goes through six key stages, each categorized by specific characteristics in a destination development. The model comprises the stages of exploration, involvement, development, consolidation, stagnation stage, and either decline or rejuvenation (Butler 1980). This model also indicates thatthe nature of tourism development in each destination permits variance in each different cycle stage as to duration and stage characteristics. Thus, there was reason to believe that the patterns of the village DMOs’ social networks would differ and impact on tourism development, and these issues were explored and analyzed in five case study sites through the use of UCINET (University of California of Irvine Network) network analysis software (Borgatti, Everett, and Freeman 2002). The DMOs in these five sites (all based in Shandong Province) represent different stages of tourism development. The village of Yang Sanyu was at the startup stage, Zhong Haoyu was experiencing growth, and Hekou represents a mature tourism destination, while the villages of Zhu Jiayu and Fanggan represent renewal and redevelopment phases. The density, centrality, closeness, reachability, sociogram graphics, and embeddedness of each network were expected to reflect the level of development that each village had reached. The village locations are shown in Figure 1. A brief description of the villages follows.

Figure 1.

The research area.

Hekou village has an economy and culture traditionally based on the fishing industry. Approximately 800 people live in the village, and the village turned to tourism when anticipating problems in the fishing industry. The Hekou Jiaodong Fishing Tourism Company was formed in 2001, and in 2013 the village won Provincial tourism awards. The village attracts more than 50,000 visitors a year and by 2015 annual household incomes had doubled their previous level of a decade earlier to a sum of about 45,000 RMB.

Zhu Jiayu village is a typical rural village of approximately 1,800 residents. From 2004 to 2010 it experimented with tourism being operated by a company external to the village but that failed to achieve any significant initiatives or growth, and hence control of tourism passed back to a village-based committee from 2011. Under the auspices of its Zhu Jiayu Tourism Limited Company, major infrastructure development took place and tourism revenues in the Golden Weeks are fast approaching 1,000,000 RMB, a sum that previously the whole village would have been fortunate to earn in a year.

Yang Sangyu is another rural village with about 580 residents with an economy traditionally based on orchards, mainly apple growing. A poor village, that before 2000, had annual household incomes of about 10,000 RMB, benefited from the dynamic leadership of a village headman, Tian Yueshui, who spent several years persuading villagers to give up traditional occupancy and land rights to eventually form the Yang Sanyu rural tourism development company. As shareholders, village members receive 60% of the profits. The village is famous for the Fu Yang Festival based on sheep culture, which lasts a month dating from the 27th day after the summer solstice. Since the establishment of the company, household annual incomes have more than doubled, and again provincial tourism awards have been won by the village.

Fanggang Village is located in a forested, mountainous area and was, in fact, an early beneficiary of tourism development. Benefiting from constructions initiated by a village chief in the mid-1970s, the village household incomes exceeded 5,000 RMB before the end of the 20th century. Currently, crucial initiatives in tourism are headed by the “Fanggan rural tourism specialized cooperative” that took charge of the tour management and marketing. By 2015 there were 40 households enrolled in this organization, which furnishes about 70 direct jobs. In 2013 for example, these 40 tour households received more than 60,000 tourists and created an income of more than 4 million RMB. However, overall the rate of increase in tourist expenditures in the village has been slowing, and there is a feeling that Fanggang needs to reconsider its tourism products that have been based on village life and branded as the “Fanggang Eco-Village.”

Zhong Haoyu is another village in the mountains and presents itself as a “leisure village.” It has approximately 340 residents. The village first commenced a modest government-backed project in tourism in 2003 involving just 5 of the 113 households in the village. At that time, the average household income was only 2,000 RMB a year, but by 2013 it had climbed to 26,400 RMB. Buoyed by this success, the Youyougu Tourism Development Company was created with assets of 30 million RMB with government support. Village members can become shareholders in the company by providing labor, or providing rooms to let, with their share value being determined by a village committee. By 2015 there were 211 village shareholders, and the company directly employs 68 households. Tourism has transformed the village economy, and each household today generally has savings of about 130,000 RMB compared to total village debt of 80,000 RMB a decade or so earlier.

Research Methods

The survey was conducted with those involved in rural tourism in the above five villages. The first author already was familiar with the villages, and prior to commencing the research returned to the villages to renew friendships and acquaintances based on her previous work there. For the research, a mixed methods approach was adopted, it being held that the research was exploratory given an apparent lack of literature about social networks of village tourism committees. The first author then spent six months conducting formal interviews and informal conversations, taking photographs, and collecting data using a structured questionnaire. She also undertook training of members of tourism committees, which gave her access to official documentation.

The main procedure to identify participants was purposive, and actors able to provide insights into rural tourism development were asked to participate. Both reputations and “snowball” sampling were used to identify participants. At the beginning, the VTC/DMO manager provided an initial name list of stakeholders. At the end of each interview, the respondent was asked if he or she knew of anyone else appropriate to complete the questionnaire.

A total of 57 formal interviews took place using an in-depth face-to-face semistructured approach that permitted flexibility in the use of follow-up questions. These were recorded and transcribed into Word files and subsequently translated. The themes related to community issues, village tourism committees and government officials, tourism enterprises, guides, visitors, and pressure groups. Each interview lasted approximately 30 minutes to 2 hours. Questioning was conducted until saturation had been reached (Strauss and Corbin 1990) meaning further respondents are not contributing new information. A further 57 separate structured questionnaires were also collected from the same respondents for social network analysis, and they represented each of the five villages, the heads of the VTCs, employees, shareholders, village members involved in tourism, folk scholars, and members of related external bodies such as the Shandong Provincial Tourism Administration. Sociograms were then compiled using UCINET, which uses a simple menu structure including file, data, transform, tools, network, visualization, and options to “map” the connections among a set of people, organizations, events, or places (Neuman 2011). This procedure discloses, analyzes, and displays sets of relations between the VTCs and the other stakeholders as described below.

The content of the questionnaires were primarily informed by two considerations. The first was to assess the formal and informal patterns of relationships within the villages as discerned through a period of immersion in the life of the village. This helped to identify respondents from who information was then sought in terms of frequency and intensity of communication, the importance attached to communications, and the other measures of network construction.

Findings

The Qualitative Phase

As explained in the next sections, a large number of themes emerged from the initial conversations and more formal interviews. Among these themes were considerations of quality of leadership at the village level. As discussed below, family linkages are strong, and this emerged as a theme as illustrated by one of the representatives (HKPG02) when he expressed his notion of the role of the patriarchal clan in rural social relations:

I think the patriarchal clan is a key to the whole of social relationships in the rural areas. The reason why I chose the village committee-dominate governance model for the DMO was also based on these close ties within the village. Actually, the DMO is the village-run enterprise that combines the enterprise management with its unique village committee. This is because this village in the whole of the Shandong province is the epitome of patriarchal villages where the clan is an extremely important key to maintaining ties among villagers.

In cases where a professional tourism administration is employed, sensitivity to local context and culture is also essential. This was evidenced by one such professional staff member from a village DMO, who commented,

When we were ready to repair the ancestral temple, the villagers stood in front of the gate, not allowing us to enter. We tried to let them know all things were under the legal permit and they have admitted us before, but nobody replied. Until I went there to ask the reason, the villager representative said to me: “You must gild instead of silvering,” at that moment, I suddenly understood what mistake I had made.

Analyzing the Qualitative Data

The first stage of the analysis began with the use of NVivo analyzing the formal interviews to identify key themes and potential nodes in the networks. Coding is the process that brings similar data together according to themes, concepts, etc. in which codes can be generated from the text or existing ideas (Lewins and Silver 2007). A theme is an outcome of coding, categorization, or analytic reflection, not something that is, in itself, coded (Saldaña 2015).

Table 2 shows the result of an analysis of respondents’ views with their different ideas of relation-based and rule-based governance in the five villages. Eight themes were identified from 129 codes with 57 interviewees relating to the social network of rural DMO (see Table 2). These are “actor enhancement,” “cultural awareness,” “focal actor,” “interest reciprocity,” “leadership,” “market competitiveness,” “networking coordination,” and “stakeholder partnerships.”

Table 2.

Themes of Nominated Codes: Responses from Different Stakeholders.

Themes	Codes Families	Sources	Refers	% of Refers	Example Quote
Actor enhancement	Enrich villagers’ life and vision Infra-structure improvements Job opportunity Service experience Staff career development	33	77	6.71	“I was too shy to open my mouth when I saw the strangers at first, while, after getting involved in the tourism business, I can speak frankly now!”
Culture awareness	Parochialism Unique rural resources Villagers’ character	39	144	12.54	“I think it is a key tie of the patriarchal clan in the whole social relationships around the rural areas. The reason why I chose the village committee-dominate governance model for the DMO was also based on these close ties within the village.”
Focal actor	Centralized management Daily work Developing context Milestone year Organization structure	44	194	16.89	“In the year of 2002, we adopted a different way from the neighboring rural destination village that has achieved its success, and we set up this rural tourism cooperative with a centralized management mechanism.”
Interest reciprocity	DMO’s interest Village interest Villagers’ benefit	38	117	10.19	“I don’t think that I could obtain more profit under its organization because nobody can punish a DMO’s unfair behavior, for example, favoring one’s relatives; thus, I am just waiting for a final agreement.”
Leadership	Building social relations Leading person	40	189	16.46	“When my door starts opening, I know that things start to happen. “
Market competitiveness	Marketing branding Product design Promotion channel Tourist	43	242	21.08	“During this busy time, all the tourism units are full of tourists with high tourist flow, and we are always unable to accept the excess booking as a result of the limited lodging capacity, with a maximum of about 220 beds.”
Networking coordination	Complaint settlement Tour householder co-ordination	25	88	7.67	“We have regular team meetings, communications, and a quite complex range of activities. We also have our own restaurant, so that most of the staff have lunch in there, where we have a good opportunity to chat with each other.”
Stakeholder partnerships	Collaborate with tour households Government support Planning by professional teams	32	97	8.45	“Our organization is thirsty for tourism professionals, you know, most of us have come from different organizations before we began working in the DMO.”
Total			1,148	100.0

These eight themes are reinforced using the similarity indices inherent in NVivo10 to express the relationships among those codes and categories. Taking the theme of “leadership” and “networking coordination,” for example, the Pearson correlation coefficient between “tour households’ coordination” and “complaint settlement” is 0.825. That between “building social relations” and “leading person” is 0.712, and while the other coefficients are deficient, the themes “networking coordination” and “leadership” are discernable. One function NVivo offers is the ability to make comparisons and distinguish between a variety of ideas from different interviewees into one or more nodes, permitting ease in comparing and contrasting respondents’ perspectives. Therefore, in this study, sets of attributes were created: one for the groups interviewed, and the other for the villages studied.

It was found that host households not only pay attention to the network coordination (21.41%), interest reciprocity (18.18%), and focal actors (17.13%) but also care about partnerships with other stakeholders (10.63%), cultural awareness (8.6%), leadership (8.59%), and personal enhancement (7.91%) when involved in rural tourism development. It is easily explained that the households hosting tour groups are the group who most closely retain contact with other actors, the VTCs, and guides because of the pecuniary advantages they gain from their collaboration. Equally, it is these groups (mainly local village households) that provide evidence of being motivated to achieve a higher standard of lifestyle by way of engaging in tourism at home. At the same time, it reflects a pattern of egocentrism to the extent that the village committees need to learn how to properly extend beyond traditional patterns to engage with the growing tourism industry to achieve broader goals. It is noted that the pro-tourist group has close correlations with two main themes: market competitiveness (53.23%) and actor enhancement (41.94%), although possibly a less than expected relationship with the theme of cultural awareness (4.84%). Other implications from the results are discussed in the individual village networks discussed below. However, Table 3 presents a summary of the results by indicating comparisons between the villages based on the emergent themes.

Table 3.

The Five Villages and Emphasize with the Eight Themes.

Themes	Fanggan	Hekou	Yang Sanyu	Zhong Haoyu	Zhu Jiayu
Actor enhancement	17.56	4.61	4.59	5.44	7.04
Culture awareness	22.56	6.59	24.02	6.71	10.1
Focal actor	7.99	12.76	14.24	25.3	22.05
Interest reciprocity	3.66	8.85	9.92	7.8	8.46
Leadership	15.36	12.65	24.11	22.79	20.26
Market competitiveness	28.35	27.23	21.42	24.93	16.12
Networking coordination	0.42	19.37	0	1.81	1.03
Stakeholder partnerships	4.1	7.93	1.69	5.22	14.93

Note: All values are percentages. The varying shades of the table cells indicate the level of importance. The darker the shade, the more important is the variable.

Table 3 indicates that Fanggan (as an example) considers market competitiveness (28.35%) as a significant factor in its rural tourism development, followed by cultural awareness (22.56%), actor enhancement (17.56%), and leadership (15.36%). It shows little concern about social networks because it has a low score for being a focal actor (7.99%), its stakeholder partnerships (4.1%), interest reciprocity (3.66%), and networking coordination (0.42%). This reflects Fanggan village’s emphasis on marketing ideas derived from its internal stakeholders as it seeks to overcome a period of stagnation that has placed it at a disadvantage with its contemporaries. What Fanggan takes pride in is the “Fanggan Spirit” of self-sufficiency, but in doing so, the village has seemingly neglected the significance of external network building, which might explain why the DMO has seemingly underperformed when hosting professional delegations. Though Hekou village has developed its rural tourism over ten years, it has balanced its social networking by the DMO as the focal actor (12.76%) sustaining close relationships with the respective internal and external stakeholders such as the household hosts and outside experts. The Hekou village destination places a high value on its brand name “Jiaodong fishing village,” which has created high levels of marketing awareness for this destination. On the other hand, Yang Sanyu seemed wholly deficient on the networking index, but it may be that the village is overly identified with the esteem in which the CEO of the DMO is held. He has been a successful village head for more than 20 years, implying that with him at the helm, there appeared little need for networking. Correspondingly, the leadership metric was 24.11%, ranking it as the first among the eight themes for Yang Sanyu.

The distribution of indices for “focal actor,” “market competitiveness,” and “leadership” in Zhong Haoyu village was evenly distributed with scores of 25.3%, 24.93%, and 22.79% respectively, which seems to reflect the status quo of the rural tourism in this village; namely, it has always been aware of marketing under the leadership of the DMO focal actor. These scores are akin to those of Zhu Jiayu—where the first four highest indices referred to the “focal actor” (22.05%), “leadership” (20.26%), “market competitiveness” (16.12%), and “stakeholder partnership” (14.93%). Later, UCINET 6.588 was used in the second stage of analysis. Table 4 summarizes the results for each of the villages.

Table 4.

Indexes of Social Networks in Case Studies.

Characteristics	Fanggan	Hekou	Yang Sanyu	Zhong Haoyu	Zhu Jiayu
Nodes	13	27	15	20	20
No. of ties	57	141	77	89	91
Average degree	4.385	5.222	5.133	4.450	4.550
Degree of centralization	0.455	0.822	0.401	0.442	0.260
Density	0.337	0.193	0.342	0.222	0.228
Components	2	2	3	3	3
Connectedness	0.846	0.963	0.819	0.861	0.853
Average distance	1.811	2.047	1.773	2.156	2.117
Compactness	0.575	0.542	0.564	0.494	0.495
Weighted clustering coefficient	0.619	0.325	0.788	0.448	0.533

From the Tables and the following five mapping network graphs, one common point across the five villages is that the VTC/DMOs and their members are the core of these networks. Yet there remain significant differences among these five rural destinations in links, degree of centralization, density, and weighted overall graph clustering coefficient. The density of the Hekou network (density = 0.193) is less than that of the other four networks. This may be due to its large size, as it had the highest number of all possible ties (nodes = 27, no. of ties = 141). This result has implications about the speed at which information or resources is diffused among the actors and the extent to which actors may have high levels of social constraints. The weighted overall graph clustering coefficient in these five destinations further confirms that the actors in Yang Sanyu (coefficient = 0.788) and Fanggan (coefficient = 0.619) are surrounded by local neighborhoods that are relatively dense, and the core actor DMO director or manager is seen as being embedded in dense local neighborhoods to a reasonably high degree.

Despite the popularity of density as a concept, its use in organizational network research has tended to be reduced to that of a control variable (Krackhardt and Kilduff 1999). Like the centralization of a network, this concept refers to the degree to which a network is centralized around one or a few actors (Kilduff and Tsai 2003). The degree centralization between the actors and the objects of the Hekou network (Deg centralization = 0.822) is almost twice than that of the Fanggan network (Deg centralization = 0.455), Yang Sanyu network (Deg centralization = 0.401), Zhong Haoyu network (Deg centralisation = 0.442) and nearly four times that of the Zhu Jiayu network (Deg centralisation = 0.260). These data imply that central actors are themselves clustered together in a more centralized structure center around the focal actor.

In addition, the tables and graphs indicate that in the case of Hekou, all the staff are clustered in the central position of its network, but the remaining four villages tend to have just one key actor at the core. Interviews with the stakeholders clearly support that in contrast to the other four destinations, Hekou is politically and historically a centralized structure (average degree = 5.222) with a higher degree of connectedness (connectedness = 0.963). Each of the villages will now be discussed in more detail in turn.

Fanggan’s Network of Relationships

Two components were found in the Fanggan destination network. One is the isolated tourist 2, and the second is the remaining actors (Figure 2), indicating that there is a certain number of individual travelers without social ties to this destination. The CEO/village head is the leader of this village and is mainly responsible for the village group being involved in traditional industry undertakings, but at the same time, he has been creating tourism development strategies through his connections with tourism experts and the government. This explains the strength of his guanxi outside of the village and the attention he has attracted from the authorities to Fanggan’s rural tourism. There are bidirectional relations between the CEO/village head and the external experts, and between the experts and the government, indicating strong ties that have benefited the development of rural tourism in this village. For the internal relations in this destination, most links are unidirectional among those actors except the two-way connection between the CEO/village head and the DMO director. Staff1 in the DMO differs from Staff2 as the former is responsible for ecotourism and the other, rural tourism. However, they are a married couple! Another mutual link is the CEO/village head and staff2, who is his niece. It is interesting to note that the possession of close family relationships (and hence genes) apparently predispose individuals to be more open and positive to tourism from an evolutionary perspective (Crouch 2013), thereby offering support to Hamilton’s (1964) concept of fitness as discussed below.

Figure 2.

The Fanggang village network.

The robustness of the structure can be tested with the use of the function CONCOR (CONvergence of iterated CORrelations), a procedure that iteratively correlates the rows (or columns) of a matrix until all the entries in the matrix are either +1 or −1 (Hanneman and Riddle 2011). The matrix can then be divided into two blocks based on these values of +1 or −1 (Wasserman and Faust 1994). The CONCOR results for the Fanggan data set are presented in Figures 3 and 4. The results in the partition diagram of Figure 3 show that there are four blocks of structurally equivalent actors. The first block contains 4 actors Director, Dstaff1, Dstaff2, Tourist1 and the second block 5 actors TH1, TH2, TH3, Villager1, and Villager2. These two blocks together comprise the grouping in the left-hand of the sociomatrix. The third block of equivalent actors identified in the partition diagram is that of isolate Tourist2. Then the fourth block contains CEO/VL, PG1, and Gover1, comprising the right-hand group in Figure 3. The results in the box of Figure 4 further present the ties among these four blocks with a good result of R-square (0.530) for its goodness of fit.

Figure 3.

CONCOR analysis for Fanggang Village—partition diagram.

Figure 4.

CONCOR analysis for Fanggang Village—block identities.

The results in both Figures 3 and 4 show structurally equivalent actors in the same block. It is noted that the relationships of information, resource, and money in this matrix correspond with those of Figure 2, the original sociomatrix. By rearranging the order of the actors and permutating rows and columns in the original matrix, the block matrix demonstrates the relationships within and across groups of actors, indicating, for example, that the links between tour hosting households and the villagers are closer than others.

Hekou’s Network of Relationships

The sociogram of Hekou in Figure 5 shows a central core comprising the DMO’s staff. Also, the graph indicates an informal liaison actor (TH5), who transfers information between two otherwise disconnected groups, namely, the DMO and the tour hosting households who live in the better housing in the north of this village. Playing mah-jongg together is the primary mode of communication for the TH5 and the other THs, who form the small group on the left-hand side of the graph. TH5 is such an active and somewhat frank person that the other THs prefer to maintain contact with her. The family of TH5 also has a private relationship with the family of the DMO vice-manager as they always have afternoon tea together. Even though their topics of conversation during their meetings are not confined to rural tourism, this is an important channel for TH5 to obtain the latest information of the incoming tour groups, the conflicts, and any changes. TH1, TH2, and TH3 live in close proximity in the south of Hekou, where the housing conditions are less than that of the north side. This leads to a lower income being derived from their tourism businesses. Usually, they only receive a phone call from the DMO and then prepare the best they can for the incoming tourists. Most of their time is spent in farming their private land. The tourist demand is higher for the better northern properties. Tourist2, Tourist3, and Tourist4 play a role as accompanying visiting delegations and thus always directly contact the manager of the DMO or the Deputy Manager if the former is away. Actor PG1 plays the bridging role for the village and the upper-level government.

Figure 5.

Sociogram showing networks for Hekou Village.

Compared with other members, the DMO manager has the far greater number of links (EgoBet = 288.63), followed by DMO staff1, who scored 112.17 for her “egobetween” links. Staff1 was often described as being easy-going, and she deputized for the manager when he was away and would then be responsible for the allocation of households to tourist groups. Hence, her central role comprises short direct paths to other actors. Furthermore, Figure 5 indicates the embryonic network of TH5 though her EgoBet index (8.50) remains less than that of DMO staff, excepting DMO staff3 (EgoBet = 0.00). However, his is a finance and accounting role. Moreover, TH5 has a low-density ego network index (36.67), implying direct connection links with other tour householders but fewer ties than the DMO possess. All of these are shown in Figure 7, which provides the statistical outcomes of the UNICET analysis for Hekou.

Yang Sanyu’s Network of Relationships

Similar diagrams were generated for the other villages. In the case of Yan Sanyu, it was found that the DMO manager, who is also the village head, is the only actor who links tour households to the tourists and the graph confirms his role as the core actor in the development of Yang Sanyu rural tourism. He controls and manages all the resources, money, and information, as well as building friendly relationships in and outside of the village. It clearly emerged that no matter whether situations involved kinship relationships or not, reciprocal altruism was evidenced in actors’ behaviors if there was a chance the beneficiary might reciprocate in the future. It implies that respondents linked altruism as coming directly from reciprocity—not indirectly through nonaltruistic group benefits, thereby reinforcing social exchange theory (Trivers 1971).

The centrality of the manager was also confirmed by metrics of centrality with an indegree index of 0.714 and an outdegree metric of 0.714, confirming his influential position as the disseminator of information to others. This concurs with Wasserman and Faust’s (1994) observation that directional relationship measures such as outdegree and indegree are quite likely to differ, and prestigious actors are usually those with high “indegrees” of communications.

Zhong Haoyu’s Network of Relationships

A similar social structure was found among the internal actors in Zhong Haoyu village. The manager of the DMO is not only responsible for the operation of the organization but also pays attention to the markets represented by tourists and the press. The presence of bidirectional arrows in these cases confirms the NVivo results that ensuring market competitiveness is a critical component of the DMO role. In the case of Zhing Haoyu, the manager is also directly responsible for the human resources management in the DMO, thereby accounting for high levels of two-way communications within the DMO group. This can be explained by the pattern of close family relationships in this village. This also explains the allocation framework of tourists where Tourist3 is friends with tour hosting household one (TH1), which facilitates stays of tourist group with whom TH1 is a member. Tourist1 and Tourist2 are leaders of delegations coming from a media and training center who have a direct connection with the DMO manager.

Assessments of the “reachability” among all the interviewed actors verified the existence of paths of varying lengths that connect them except for Tourist4 and Tourist5, both of whom were introduced by Tourist3 so that they compose another subpopulation. Nonetheless, the information flow was accessible to all. Indeed, the DMO manager often stated that his most important object is not money but his cell phone because all the people that he wants to get in touch with are listed through his calls.

Zhu Jiayu Network of Relationships

The sociogram for Zhu Jiayu comprised three components. Tourist2 was isolated from other actors because of being a tourist from Italy. Tourist1 is one of Villager1’s friends. The middle part is the group of village locals, including tour hosting households, other villagers, village heads, and the administrator of the DMO, who was once the village head, but is now employed by the new DMO as an administrator responsible for the connections between the village and other organization. The right-hand part of the diagram (Figure 6) includes the staff of the DMO, the town government (Tgover), the municipal government (Mgover), and the press group (PG1, PG2). It appears the structural “components” in the Zhu Jiayu network are linked by just two actors. Hence one key identifying feature of this newly reconstructed network is the emergence of an administrative entity that acts as a broker to coordinate the activities of the whole network. It is the role of this actor (the administrator) to help build the network, coordinate and manage its activities, support network firms, and network-level goals, and “provide a centralized location for performing key activities of the network” (Human and Provan 2000). Thus, the administrator assumes the role of linking the two densely structured groups to ensure the destination is well connected. Notably, Villager1 introduced Tourist1 and tour hosting households privately, which is not formally permitted from the perspective of the DMO, as only the DMO has the right of tourist allocation. The reason why this behavior deviates from standard operating procedures is that Tourist1 expects to save on entry fees, and the tour household wishes to earn more money without submitting management fees to the DMO. Additionally, Villager1 could enhance his friendship with Tourist1 and the other tour households privately. There are also the bidirectional relations in the triangle in the shape of the manager, the municipal government and the expert in press group1, as the expert is introduced by the municipal government to the manager, and after several rounds of formal meetings and informal drinking together, they have finalized the rural tourism planning of this destination. In short, the manager and the expert have developed a friendly relationship.

Figure 6.

Sociogram showing networks for Zhu Jiayu Village.

To obtain more specific information about subgroups in the division of this village, a clique analysis on the adjacency matrix was undertaken. Eleven cliques were found, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7.

Clique analysis for Zhu Jiayu.

Each clique represents a cohesive subgroup, with every individual linked to every other individual. The result shows that the administrator of the DMO and the manager of the DMO belong to more than one clique; for example, Dadministrator belongs to clique1, clique2, clique3, clique4, and clique5, and that some actors belong to no clique (Tourist1 and Tourist2). Interviews revealed that the members of DMO cliques (clique8 and clique10) regarded themselves as superior to clique1, clique2, clique3, and clique11 as they have direct relationships with the municipal government and are allocated roles by that government.

Implications of the Findings

To summarize, this study identified eight themes derived from codes generated by interviewees relating to the expectations of village DMOs. These are “actor enhancement,” “culture awareness,” “focal actor,” “interest reciprocity,” “leadership,” “market competitiveness,” “networking coordination,” and “stakeholder partnerships.” In each of the villages there are differing means by which local DMOs meet the expectations of network stakeholders. Qualitative results indicate the following: (1) the more developed is the rural destination, the more attentive it is to market competitiveness; (2) the more dependence there is on the DMO’s manager as an individual actor, the less emphasis there is on networking coordination; (3) in DMOs’ networks where there is an overdependence on one particular organizational stakeholder, the network structure tends to be looser when compared with those depending on more than one specific actor; (4) the closer the internal ties of the DMO, the tighter was the whole DMO social network; (5) the tighter is the overall DMO’s social network, the more developed is the rural destination; and (6) the reputation of rural DMOs’ managers is not because of position per se, but instead it is based on performance and long-term contribution to the whole village. In turn, though, the establishment of the position of a rural DMO manager in itself could empower the management of rural tourism when it is combined with the support of local households involved in tourism. In short, community social dynamics possess importance and the DMO manager has both symbolic and effective importance. Being at the center of a rural DMO’s social network, the manager possesses resources of information and influence. This includes access to resources beyond the village. The DMO manager is therefore often strategically located in the networks and can influence the group by withholding or distorting information in transmission (Freeman 1979).

Ryan (2020) noted that marketing in its fullest sense required product design, customer identification, the recognition of customer needs, and responsible promotional and pricing policies—all within a context of social and environmental constraints that must be incorporated into tourism zone development from the initial phases of that development. Networks validate these ideas by examining the roles of stakeholders that are cross-sectoral, administrative, and engage across geographical boundaries. In practice, however, the Chinese rural tourism network is not wholly consistent with network theory design. For example, theory dictates that an effective network should possess a clear common goal among the stakeholders. In fact, it appears that Chinese rural networks tend to a lose organizational structure often bound together by familial ties and broader guanxi. In these cases, function, personality, family ties, and governmental sponsorship weave their way through the networks in interdependent and integrative ways that practically differ from Western DMOs. Hence, the second author had the experience when revisiting the Jingling Mountains that an accommodation’s business had declined as local governmental bodies were making fewer bookings because of anticorruption measures, and thus patronage was less effective than before. Many interviewees commented that there is often a significant variance between stated practice and the actual planning and marketing of their villages. Nonetheless, despite such flaws, the study indicates that the more structured is the DMO network, the more prosperous is the destination. While family ties and those of friendship, patronage, and mutual self-interest are important, it is not realistic to continue to rely on these relationships in the future for the following reasons. First, there is a growing difference among the various relationships that reflect the content of each tie. Friendship relationships differ from business relationships as there is no need for formal documented contracts for the former, while they are necessary for the latter. Second, each tie has its temporal durability in terms of short, medium, or long term. As such, even though there are imbalanced relationships between current dominant political forces and local tourism business at present, these may well be of limited duration because as tourism numbers and revenues grow, so actors may wish to shift their relationships to others who can provide more benefit. One such example was a householder establishing her own relationships with visiting tourists who wished both to use the same accommodation provider and to avoid additional fees. As the Internet begins to spread through these villages, such arrangements will become more common.

The findings also throw into sharp relief the roles of Chinese village DMOs, and a list of these functions is provided in Table 5. Various characteristics can be noted. First, like many destination organizations around the world, they are organic in the way in which they respond to the external dynamics of the societies of which they are part, reflecting both tradition and challenge. However, possibly one feature specific to China’s rural context is the importance of possessing a legal authority. That legality bestows importance to the holder of the DMO director’s position because, in these villages, traditionally it is the village headman who possesses a formalized power. Tourism potentially offers those headmen a chance to extend their influence in different ways, or to create a post that challenges traditional authoritative structures. Second, it places the DMO in the context of the wider chain of distribution of the tourism industry stretching into the higher echelons of the Shandong Provincial Tourism Administration and even into the hierarchy of provincial government. Third, the DMO enhances a manager’s role within their own constituency of the village itself, especially when they can allocate visitors to the host households. While this is an obvious source of village power, it is also constrained by the dynamics of the village. Any CEO perceived as being too nepotistic could face challenges, while equally there is the expectation that benefits should come in terms of enhanced incomes. By the same token, any CEO must also fulfill the expectation of the Shandong authorities if they are to retain their position and role. Guanxi is thus vital. Additionally, if the corporate structures of the village tourism bodies appoint to the CEO position a person not previously directly associated with the village through family links but possessing guanxi with the municipal or provincial government, then village social dynamics may be changed. Such examples are evidenced by the Golden Peacock Company in Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture, who bring more professional business practices to the region.

Table 5.

Roles of Chinese Village DMOs.

Roles	Contents
Folk defender	Try to integrate village folk and customers into rural tourism to develop its unique tourism products.Keep the local accent in villages.Balance conflicts by using the local traditional ways.
Key connector	Internal and external relations.Close ties in the village.Wide ties outside the village.
Marketer	Propose brilliant ideas originated from local-oriented culture.Market the village’s tourism products to the outside.Welcome and organize outsiders into the village.
Gatekeeper	Cull, craft, and transfer bits of useful information to its stakeholders.Release the village’s tourism information to the outside.
Interest allocator	Set the rural tourism revenue allocation ratio.Allocate tourists into the designated household.Charge tourists fee as an independent company.May redistribute tourism income between village households.
Resources developer	Develop rural landscapes based on the rural resources.Develop local catering and accommodation products with locals.Develop traditional festival and attract tourists.
Trainer	Be responsible of training village tourism units periodically.

Compared with other countries’ tourism marketing organizations, Chinese village DMOs undertake more roles of managing and marketing rural tourism than merely those of market promotion (see Table 5). Each of the sample villages is, in fact, its own independent destination, and the village DMO’s administration identifies not only the product but the roles of other actors, namely, who is permitted to offer accommodation, what prices are to be charged, how the revenue is generated by rural tourism products and services, and then how it will be disseminated within the village community. Therefore, the Chinese village DMO differs from DMOs in many other countries, particularly when reinforced by the Chinese government’s Pro-Poor and Rural Re-Generation Development policies. It is for these reasons that the social networks are important, and they also reflect the mutual reciprocal relationships of guanxi.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to ensconcing tourism administration within village structures. The advantages, as shown, are based on close familial ties and the neighborhood possessing shared interests. Additionally, in this study, the parochialism of rural destinations, their unique rural resources and the character of villagers in Shandong province reflect an awareness of local culture when DMO relationships are established with others. The results show that villagers in Shandong’s rural society are inclined to retain contact with those people who have kinships in the village. They are familiar with each other as their families have jointly lived together for several generations, and this familiarity is developed from frequent and repeated interaction occurring over a long period of time (Fei 1992). Furthermore, the levels of trust between the DMO and the other stakeholders are derived from shared modes of behavior in rural society. These reinforce villagers and tour households’ belief in the proposals made by the local DMO staff. Therefore, as noted above, the DMOs are locally organized, and the DMO staff are primarily local residents who speak the local dialect as the main language of communication even though able to speak Mandarin. They often share and certainly understand the villagers’ attachments to the soil. The special parochial cluster, in turn, has facilitated the DMO’s daily operations and connections. Like any patriarchal clan in any village, it is common that close family clan relationships exist within rural people, and hence the DMOs, and it was not uncommon for a respondent to say at the beginning of an interview something like: “Actually, the woman you interviewed yesterday is my sister-in-law.” As pointed out by a referee for this paper, such an observation is empirically consistent with Hamilton’s concept of “inclusive fitness” (1964) that explains in reproductive terms why individuals who are related genetically choose to aid each other over others who are not biologically related. These arrangements, according to Hamilton, bestow a selective advantage based on sociobiological factors. This concept has been explored in the wider tourism context by Fennell (2006), who, however, based on earlier arguments of Wheeller (2004) that much of tourism is based on greed, suggests that in the tourist–host relationship such reciprocal altruism breaks down and cheating follows because the host–guest relationship is asymmetrical. Put simply, hosts (and cooperative arrangements among hosts) are permanent and guests are temporary.

Here, however, the social networks under examination are contextualized in a village of Chinese guanxi reciprocity, and in terms of the time dimension, villagers who might be tempted to cheat would need to consider the long-term consequences when living cheek by jowl with neighbors. Additionally adherence to social norms are also reinforced not only by genetics but sociopolitical realities. Hence the study implies that if rural poverty is to be eliminated in China by 2020, Beijing will have to recognize the closeness of familial ties that exist within the villages. Rather than seek to impose external solutions it may be better to consult with and offer training and help to village members in a cooperative manner to achieve the desired goals.

There is, however, a caveat. The study lacks a dynamic analysis of village DMOs’ social network. Because of time constraints, the study was unable to use longitudinal analysis and can only adopt static measurement confined to a time and place. The dynamic evolution of village DMOs’ network would merit further research. Indeed, more longitudinal and comparative research between China’s village DMOs’ social networks and those of the West would highlight the significance of political systems in shaping approaches to rural tourism development.

Supplemental Material

Appendix_June_15th – Supplemental material for China’s Village Tourism Committees: A Social Network Analysis

Supplemental material, Appendix_June_15th for China’s Village Tourism Committees: A Social Network Analysis by Jin Yi, Chris Ryan and Degang Wang in Journal of Travel Research

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Chris Ryan

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author Biographies

Jin Yi gained her doctoral degree in tourism from the University of Waikato in 2017. She had previously worked in the Shandong Tourism Destination Organisation educating and supporting tourism initiatives in the villages.

Chris Ryan is Professor of Tourism at the University of Waikato Management School and director of the BUU New Zealand-China Tourism Research Unit. His research interests are in tourism behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour. He has published over 200 refereed journal articles.

Degang Wang is Director of the Shandong University School of Management and of its Tourism Research Centre. He has over 100 academic papers including 20 in China’s leading tourism journal, Tourism Tribune and been engaged in many Chinese governmental tourism planning programmes.

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