Study on Tourism Size of Provinces and Primary Cities in China
中国省际及主要旅游城市旅游规模

Tourism has made great progress in China since the implementation of reform and opening-up policy, and the quantity of foreign and domestic tourists has a great increase not only in every province but also in cities. Based on the theory of primate city distribution and rank-size distribution which have been frequently used in urban geography since the 1920s, this paper uses the date of major cities and provinces to explain tourism size distribution on the scale of province and single city in China. Considering the possible error in recording the number of the domestic tourists, this paper selects the number of foreign tourists as the criterion of tourism size. On provincial scale, tourism size distribution follows primate city distribution, Beijing and Guangdong province are the primate province (city) in turn since 1990, the primate quotiety is between 1 to 1.6. What is more, according to the balance of the size and rank change, the tourism size growth mode of the province in China can be classified as equalization mode, accelerate growth mode, decelerate growth mode whereas through regression, tourism size turns out to follow the rank-size distribution on single city scale, the tourism size and its rank accords with the Pareto distribution well. Besides, this paper also discusses the impacts of the facts, such as economic condition, city function, tourism resource and boundary port on tourism size distribution, aiming at offering a new method for research of the tourism size and assisting the formulation of tourism policies at national and regional levels.