Jing Wang

With the implementation of China’s Rural Revitalization Strategy, more and more traditional villages have been developed. However, due to the lack of value awareness, many rural planning policies are unreasonable, and therefore, characteristics disappear. In the past, the value identification of traditional villages mostly stayed in the general value description, which was not enough to highlight the unique overall value of the village. From the perspective of the cultural landscape, taking Liufang village in Liping County of Guizhou Province as an example, this paper interprets the value of cultural landscape from the concept of “long-term interaction between human and nature,” and then carry out three value themes of “settlement landscape of Dong people in the low and middle mountain valley area,” “agricultural landscape and activities of Dong people under traditional rice farming,” and “spiritual landscape of Dong People’s beliefs, systems and customs”. Moreover, by interviewing local residents, this paper summarizes two aspects of Liufang village value consensus—traditional culture and landscape construction, as well as tourism development opportunities and challenges—and analyzes the relationship between them. The new attempt to identify traditional village’s value in this paper lies in the combination of object value and subject perception, which is more conducive to the scientific formulation of traditional village protection and tourism sustainable development strategy.

The research on community empowerment in the protection and utilization of ancient towns has practical significance for the sustainable development of ancient towns. Combined with empirical research, questionnaire survey, this paper analyzes the residents’ awareness of empowerment in the community participation of tourism, taking Zhujiajiao ancient town as a case study. Firstly, the evaluation system of community empowerment is established from four dimensions, including economy, society, politics, and psychology. Secondly, the weights of various factors are calculated by using the analytic hierarchy process, and the status quo of community tourism empowerment is comprehensively evaluated by the fuzzy analysis method. The results show that the degree of community empowerment in Zhujiajiao ancient town is between “average” and “good”. Psychological empowerment has the best score, while political empowerment is relatively weak. So, the dilemma of the top-down participation system needs to be changed. Self-government tourism organizations and the rules of income distribution should be established along with the ability training of tourism management to optimize the community participation mechanism. Application of the analytic hierarchy process to ancient town tourism empowerment is a new attempt and the evaluation scale can be used to other similar sites. Strategies in this paper have referential value for tourism sustainability in practice.