The thematic literature review of the research topic is beneficial to theorize and systematize the evolution and development of the research content, and further, critically evaluate the overall development direction and future evolution. Based on the journal literatures of CNKI from 1987 to 2018 in approximately 30 years, this study statistically analyzes the basic pattern of tourist behavior in China (research stages, core institutions, core authors, core journals and research topics). The research on tourist behavior in China has going through four stages of gradual development: beginning, development, maturity and prosperity. In addition, the core institutions and authors have centralized and overlapped on geographical distribution, and the core authors are all full-time teachers or researchers, with higher professional titles. Finally, the top ten core journals mainly focus on the journals of tourism and geography. Based on these information, this paper summarizes and reviews the research results of tourist behavior in China from four aspects: perspective selection, theory promotion, method using and practical application. It is found that the study of tourist behavior in China is moving towards multi-perspective, multi-theory and multi-method, thus provides important implications for tourism practice. This paper proposes that the future study of Chinese tourist behavior should be further explored from four directions of object expansion, data acquisition, method update and theoretical construction. The study on localization of tourist behavior should not only focus on the universality of knowledge contribution, but also on the improvement based on China's own social and cultural characteristics, so as to realize the equal dialogue with international tourist behavior research and solve the practical problems of Chinese tourism development.

Social orientation is a description of adjustment mechanism of Chinese people in their daily life. It represents the approaches that Chinese people interact with the environment in their life circle with emphasis on the harmony relationship that individuals established and maintained with the environment, especially the social environment, evolving from obedience, cooperation to integration. One of its features is the importance of “guanxi” （relation in English expression） in Chinese culture and the daily life of Chinese people. In traditional Chinese society, “guanxi” is the way people define themselves. More importantly, in the process of social interaction, relationship between one and the other determines the way they treat each other. Relational determinism argues that the rules, manners and co-dependence pattern of both sides treating each other are not the same in different types of relationship, and even the emotional consequences generated by interaction show significant difference. Based on the theories mentioned above and literature review of VFR tourism, the paper proposed that the understanding of VFR tourism should be based on the view of social relation. From this perspective, some basic theories about VFR tourism were redefined, including the concept of VFR tourist, the host, and VFR tourism type. Based on these theories, this article constructed the interaction mechanism of VFR tourists and their hosts from the perspective of social relation. Under this mechanism, there are three types of social interaction processes under three different relationship situations:（1）under the emotional relationship, the host treats the tourists warmly and actively, which follows the principal of requirement;（2）under the instrumental relationship, the host treats the tourists appropriately, which follows the principal of “renqing”;（3）under the mixed relationships, the host treats the tourists passively, which follows the principal of fairness. The future VFR tourism study should follow this research idea: leading in from holistic perspective, analyzing with process theory, and summarizing with teleology, which may contribute to the further development of VFR tourism.