IFTM Assistant Professor Dr. Yang Jingjing has recently taken part in several academic activities discussing the impact on tourism of a number of national development strategies, including the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative and the Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The latter initiative is also known as the Greater Bay Area.
Dr. Yang was invited by Beijing Union University to deliver a talk last November titled “Tourism Development and Cooperation in Education in the Greater Bay Area”. Participants included scholars and students from higher education organisations throughout China.
Also in November last year, Dr. Yang conducted a training course on cultural and tourism development within the Greater Bay Area, using as reference the Tokyo Bay Area in Japan, the New York metropolitan area in the United States, and the San Francisco Bay Area also in the U.S. The programme was directed at heads of tourism bureaus from Guangdong cities within the Greater Bay Area. According to Dr. Yang, participants gave positive feedback on the training, and praised the insights shared with them by the IFTM scholar.
Dr. Yang later attended an international online conference on “Contemporary Approaches and Intercultural Communications in Development of Tourism on Silk Road”. The event, held in December 2020, was co-organised by Beijing International Studies University and “Silk Road” International University of Tourism in the Republic of Uzbekistan. Dr. Yang delivered a keynote speech at the conference, discussing cultural tourism linked to China’s sea goddess known in the south of the country as A-Ma, and such tourism’s relationship with the Belt and Road initiative.
More recently, Dr. Yang was involved in the production of the “Report on China’s Ice and Snow Tourism Development (2021)”, released by the China Tourism Academy in early January. The report received wide national media coverage, as it forecast Chinese tourists would make 230 million trips to places with ice and snow during the current winter season that runs from November 2020 to March 2021.
As China prepares to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, ski and snow tourism has gained additional relevance nationally, and so has Dr. Yang’s expertise on this field. She has published a book considered the first Chinese publication covering academic knowledge linked to the topic. She has also taken part in planning projects on ski and snow tourism respectively in Hebei Province, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and in Heilongjiang Province, the latter involving the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
“I hope that my knowledge, my abilities, can contribute to national development,” Dr. Yang says. She gives as an example her work on cultural tourism linked to the goddess A-Ma, a deity also known as Mazu. “This cultural phenomenon is not only restricted to Macao,” Dr. Yang explains. “It exists in many places like Hong Kong, Mainland China, Chinese Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Through investigation on this special topic, we can learn more about how this kind of tourism can be further developed.”
The IFTM academic is an accomplished scholar and researcher. Dr. Yang joined the Institute at the start of the current academic year, after stints in academia in the United Kingdom and Mainland China. Her professional experience includes work related to governmental affairs, tourism, planning and consultancy.
Research by Dr. Yang has been featured in top-rated academic journals, books and international conferences. She is Associate Editor (China) of the leading international journal Tourism Management.
