Place Attachment, Identity and Community Impacts of Tourism: The Case of a Beijing Hutong

The purpose of this chapter is to examine place attachment and attitudes of residents of Shi Cha Hai hutong to the growth of tourism as visitors are drawn to this part of Beijing, China. The chapter will describe the location where the study was undertaken, indicate the research methods used and describe the results. The description of the results has two main sections: (a) descriptive statistics reporting the scores derived from a quantitative survey, followed by (b) multivariate analysis. The research design was informed by two sets of literature discussed in the following. These are (a) past studies of the impacts of tourism published in the tourism literature, and (b) the psychological theories of place attachment associated with Breakwell’s (1986, 1992) identity process model (and see Breakwell and Canter 1993). However, given that the data were derived from a Chinese cultural and heritage setting, the article commences with a description of the research locale.