Inbound Tourism Development at the Western Border Region of China

Based on literature review and statistics of National Tourism Administration of China and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Tourism Bureau, this article examines the trends of inbound tourism development in the region. The results show that the inbound tourists in the XUAR are only a tiny portion of the Chinese, and the regional total which mainly is made up of domestic tourism originated from the coastal areas. Among the Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan has become the largest inbound tourism market of the XUAR. The article further suggests that it is worth to investigate whether the inbound tourism development of the region is affected by the geopolitical and geo-economic situations and the national strategic interests of respective neighboring countries. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.