Protection plan or white elephant?

I've visited many counties and villages where the local tourism bureaus were eager to show off their big projects.

Although the attractions range from hotels to amusement parks to Buddhist mountain retreats, they all share a common goal: to become hugely popular and attract millions of tourists - and their cash - every year.

The last project I visited, hidden in a remote village in Zhejiang province, aims to combine figures from Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity in a religious theme park. The main investors are said to have sunk 1 billion yuan ($160 million) into the attraction.

I always come away from these scenes with the same questions in my mind: Is this type of tourism really a suitable way of developing these villages? What would be left if every village chose to go down that road?

Before I visited Songyang county, I was afraid that it was going to be just another tourist project, practically indistinguishable from those I had encountered many times before.

It was a relief, therefore, when I interviewed Wang Jun, Songyang's magistrate. He expressed a desire to limit tourist numbers to preserve the village environment and benefit the local residents, saying that it would be a failure for Songyang if the tourists who visit in big buses and cars blocked all the roads and disrupted village life.

"Tourism is not our ultimate goal. It's just a means of helping Songyang to preserve its agricultural heritage and maintain the people's traditional lives," he said.

It isn't a case of Wang not wanting to follow the principle of "the more, the merrier" like so many other decision-makers; it's simply that he sees the reality behind the promotions.

In truth, these isolated mountain villages will never have the infrastructure to allow them to welcome as many tourists as predicted. That realization led the authorities in Songyang to opt for a more sustainable way of developing its tourist industry.

The county invited elite architects and designers to rebuild the old houses and transform them into classy guesthouses targeting certain demographic groups.

Last year, visitors flooded into a number of villages in Northeastern China after they were featured in a popular TV program. A rudimentary tourist infrastructure was quickly put into place, and people rushed to the villages during winter, despite the surprisingly high cost. However, most of the visitors said they wouldn't return, because the experience wasn't worth the money and cited the inconvenience of traveling on country roads.

That story makes me pessimistic about the future of the proposed tourist boom, which may only last two to three years. While the experts say tourism is the most efficient way of saving China's traditional villages, the big questions are: What are the best methods of developing the industry, and to what extent should it be developed? Those questions need to be answered, and quickly.