How Can Rural Tourism Development Play the "Specialty Card" Well?
Recently, the State Council executive meeting proposed actively developing personalized and distinctive rural tourism, which points the way for further promoting rural tourism development. In recent years, China's rural tourism has flourished, and rural tourism has gradually become a choice for people's leisure vacations. Local governments have seized the opportunity and actively built regional specialty sightseeing belts, effectively driving the development of local leisure agriculture and the tourism industry. However, the impulse for rural tourism development has exceeded rationality. In some places, a lack of overall planning awareness and professional talent has led to problems such as single forms of resource development and a proliferation of homogenized products lacking appeal, which have drawn public criticism.
When developing rural tourism, some villages and towns lack a correct understanding of themselves. When planning and building, they rely on feelings and follow the crowd. They imitate whatever others do, and villages in different places look almost indistinguishable. This kind of rural tourism can hardly be competitive in the market. There are also some villages and towns that ignore the industrial characteristics of rural tourism and blindly renovate infrastructure. Riverbanks originally lined with graceful willows and green grass have been turned into concrete roads and utility poles, and originally winding and elegant mountain paths have been piled into dull stone steps. Without studying tourists' psychology and self-righteously “upgrading hardware,” these blind operations not only cause huge waste but also lead to the loss of what is most precious and core to the countryside's competitiveness.
The reason rural tourism has been sought after in recent years is precisely that, as urbanization continues to rise, more and more people miss the rich local cultural characteristics, and tourists come precisely to experience a strong sense of nostalgia. A lack of thinking and innovation will only leave one behind in market competition, while the situation of “a thousand villages with the same face” invisibly gives those villages and towns willing to provide a better rural tourism experience the opportunity to build brands and capture the market.
To do rural tourism well, integrating local specialty farming activities is key. If rural tourism is regarded as a vase, then specialty farming activities are the flowers arranged in the vase. If rural tourism is to stand out in fierce competition, its products cannot be too single; tourism products should be given rich connotations. Since it is rural tourism, local specialty farming culture should be fully explored, and rural tourism should be closely combined with its specialties so as to package a richer variety of tourism products. The ten-thousand-mu rapeseed flower fields in Luoping County, Yunnan Province, are renowned at home and abroad. Using the brand effect of its rapeseed flowers, Luoping County encouraged farmers to set up “flower sea farm stays,” effectively combining local specialty agriculture with rural tourism and achieving a strong aggregation effect.
⟦NL> To do rural tourism well, one must understand that culture is the soul of rural tourism. Tourists who choose rural tourism care most about whether they can experience rich local culture. Many villages rush to launch projects such as fruit picking and sightseeing fishing, but these are far from the whole of rural tourism and will only take tourists farther and farther away from genuine rural customs. Haifeng Farm in Dafeng City, Jiangsu Province, was originally a branch farm of Shanghai Farm, and the farm received a total of 80,000 Shanghai educated youths. Using its deep educated-youth culture, Dafeng City dug deep into educated-youth resources and built a uniquely distinctive Dafeng Educated Youth Farm Experience Base. Combined with other local rural tourism projects, rural tourists from the Yangtze River Delta region come in an endless stream every year. Cultural symbols truly give rural tourism here a soul, making it irreplaceable compared with other places.
To do rural tourism well, making tourists feel nostalgia is the focus. The place you cannot return to is called hometown, and the time you cannot return to is called the past. It can be said that what big cities lack most is the experience of returning to one's hometown and savoring nostalgia. When developing rural tourism, we should pay attention to protecting the village's complete traditional layout, historical environmental elements, natural landscapes, and cultural inheritance. When Huamao Village in Zunyi County, Guizhou Province, developed rural tourism, it preserved “historical relics” such as the old earthen walls, cattle sheds, and even the barns used for traditional flue-cured tobacco in earlier years. In addition, Huamao Village awakened its sleeping pottery culture. It is said that when Moutai liquor became internationally famous, the vessels used were produced in this village. Through cultural excavation, an industry was formed for the village while also allowing tourists to appreciate local culture.
The development of rural tourism can not only expand agriculture from a single production function to multiple functions such as leisure sightseeing, farming experience, ecological protection, and cultural inheritance, but also drive the integration of the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, broaden the paths for local people, especially farmers, to become wealthy, and serve as a powerful driving force for developing modern agriculture and promoting agricultural modernization. As an emerging tourism product, rural tourism encounters “growing pains” such as homogenization and simplification, which are also unavoidable in the development of any industry. As long as it is based on local characteristics, environmental features, and folk customs, and original ecological and specialty resources are developed with different methods, rural tourism will surely forge a uniquely distinctive path to enrich farmers and strengthen agriculture.