Future of Dunhuang — A Study of Innovative Heritage Management and Involvement of Local Communities for Valorization and Sustainable Tourism

This thesis discusses the conservation and sustainable development of cultural heritage tourism, focusing on how to achieve community participation and value addition in China. We take the World Heritage Site of Dunhuang as the target of the study and compare it to different natural and cultural World Heritage sites in Italy. Many past studies have presupposed the same cultural context with little regard for cultural contextual differences, resulting in theories which are valuable but that are problematic to transmit across cultures, presenting difficulties such as the potential for translation of specialized vocabulary to cause misunderstanding in different cultural contexts. Through a comparison with Italy, this thesis analyzes the characteristics of heritage conservation and tourism development in China within the Chinese political and cultural context, and elaborates on the valorization of local community participation. The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical basis for cultural tourism and community participation in China, and to be a reference for other cases of the same type.