Tourism in Asia: A Review of the Achievements and Challenges

Since the appearance of our co-edited book Tourism in South-East Asia (Hitchcock, King and Parnwell 1993), now well over a decade ago, the study of tourism development in the region and more widely in Asia has come of age. Janet Cochrane's ambitious edited volume Asian Tourism: Growth and Change (2008a ), with its thirty-one chapters, three sub-section introductions and 40 contributors drawn from a variety of disciplines, marks a further significant step in the development of scholarship on Asian tourism. The country coverage is impressive; as well as cross-regional chapters there are contributions on Bhutan, India, Sri Lanka, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia and Tibet. As a substantial Asia-wide volume with several contributions from both well-established scholars in tourism studies (Airey, Arlt, Butler, Cheung, Cochrane, Goodwin, Hitchcock, Sofield, and Wall) as well as a significant number of early career researchers, many of them Asian, it deserves to be set in a wider research context. This present extended review article provides an opportunity to take stock of some general contributions to the study of Asian and more particularly Southeast Asian tourism, identify some of the important scholarly achievements, linking them where appropriate with Cochrane's book, and to indicate areas of research still in urgent need of attention.

I should confess at this point that I contributed to the organization of the conference from which about two-thirds of Cochrane's book emerged. The conference originally entitled Tourism in Asia: New Trends, New Perspectives held at Leeds Metropolitan University in collaboration with the University of Leeds, on 10–12 June 2006 was designed in a wide-ranging way to address the character and effects of the increasing volume of intra-regional and domestic tourism, growing regional cooperation in tourism, the responses of the tourism industry to new and changing markets, and government policy and strategic developments, with some attention to ethnographic, comparative and specific case studies (Cochrane 2008b , p. xix). The conference was aimed not only at academic researchers, but also tourism professionals who wished to gain greater insights into the expanding Asian market, and development practitioners keen to understand how tourism can be used as a development tool. However, I have not contributed to the published volume nor did I fulfil any editorial responsibilities so that I think that I remain sufficiently impartial to be able to evaluate the book's contribution to Asian tourism studies.

It is to Cochrane's credit that she has managed to meld together a vast array of conference papers and specially commissioned pieces into a reasonably coherent and interconnected book. Having said this, given the broad coverage of the volume, some of the chapters might have been repositioned and connected to reflect rather more decisively some of the important themes which emerge from the book. Cochrane arranges the chapters into three sub-sections which are designed to reflect tourism policy, markets and industry concerns in a changing environment: (1) the politics and policies of Asian tourism; (2) market demand and supplier response; and (3) destinations, industry and the forces of change. However, three very significant themes cross-cut these categories: the tensions between wider processes of globalization and international market forces and the policies and practices of national governments; the character, effects and underlying tourist motivations generated in intra-Asian tourism; and finally the development of new kinds of tourism experience alongside already established ones. Our long-standing preoccupations in tourism studies with host-guest interactions are given interesting new glosses and further opportunities for new lines of enquiry with Cochrane's and her contributors' examination of the encounters between Asians in the context of a rapidly changing and diversifying tourism industry. These transformations, as Geoff Wall observes in his keynote chapter, must be placed in a context in which tourism growth rates have been "uneven temporally and spatially" resulting in marked regional imbalances and unequal...