High-quality development is essential to Chinese modernization. As a strategic pillar industry, tourism plays a key role in the Chinese national economy and in people’s livelihoods. It is, therefore, imperative to promote high-quality tourism development. This paper focuses on such important issues as theoretical connotation, opportunities and challenges, strategic priorities, and logical approaches to high-quality tourism development from the perspective of Chinese modernization. The core insights are as follows: (1) The theoretical connotation of high-quality tourism development from the perspective of Chinese modernization should be understood with a view to satisfying public needs with higher-quality services, promoting common prosperity, continuously boosting the in-depth integration of culture and tourism, promoting the harmonious coexistence of man and nature, and serving as a bridge of peace; (2) To promote high-quality development of cultural tourism from the perspective of Chinese modernization, it is necessary to clarify the realistic, academic, and promotional rationales for the development of high-quality modernized Chinese tourism; (3) A new method of high-quality tourism development can be explored with a focus on high-quality tourism supply, coordinated development of the tourism industry, in-depth integration of culture and tourism, and green transformation of the tourism industry; (4) High-quality tourism development will help create a new variety of Chinese modernization through establishing a more resilient cultural and tourism supply, activating and guiding inclusive cultural tourism consumption, comprehensively promoting the in-depth integration and innovation of cultural tourism, and establishing a higher-quality cultural tourism service system; (5) Promoting high-quality rural tourism development and opening up the transformational channel of “turning lucid waters and lush mountains into invaluable assets” are conducive to revitalizing rural areas, gradually realizing common prosperity, and expediting Chinese modernization.

As an important theme of rural aesthetics and an expression of “landscape symbol,” “nostalgia” plays an important role in preserving collective memory and continuing local culture in rural tourism. Wang Ge Zhuang, Qingdao, and Shandong were selected as the sites for the case study. Based on the proposition that “nostalgia can be represented in the form of landscape” and in the visual context, this study uses Metaphor Extraction Technology (ZMET) to explore the process of both tourists and local residents’ cognition and identification of the local nostalgia landscape and analyzes the socio-culturally significant construction logic of “nostalgia” from a semiotic perspective. The research findings are as follows. (1) The nostalgia landscape system of Wang Ge Zhuang comprises three elements of “taste memory,” “ritual scene,” and “living environment.” All kinds of landscape symbols are both dynamic and static and integrated as a whole with distinct and detailed individuality. (2) Nostalgia itself has the striking features of time and subjectivity, and different social and cultural meanings are constructed due to changes in time and various emotional perspectives. In this study, the ultimate symbolic attributes of the nostalgia landscape contain the four dimensions of ecology, culture, emotion, and social value and show the characteristics of reflectiveness and foresight with the progress of time. (3) Visual senses can directly stimulate nostalgic memory, but the deep experience of nostalgia is often the result of the joint action of multiple senses (such as taste). Importance should be attached to the expression of the nostalgia landscape and to the establishment of a “multiple embodied vision mechanism” in the future development of rural tourism.

As the first practical case of institutionalizing the “property rights of traditional villages as tourist attractions,” the “Azheke Plan” has successfully cracked the capital logic of rural tourism development and provided a Chinese solution for tourism-based global poverty reduction. To clarify its reference value, Bourdieu’s social practice theory was used to illustrate the practical logic of the plan and its universality. The research results are as follows. (1) The heritage identity of Azheke village and China’s management system of cultural relics constitute a structural boundary that helps guide the plan’s implementation and thus determine the particularity of institutionalizing the “property rights of tourist attraction,” which in turn provides a dual economic and institutional guarantee for heritage protection and tourism joint-stock operation; this enables it to transcend individual particularity and at the same time have certain collective universality. (2) The management system of cultural heritage and the institutionalized “property rights of tourist attractions” jointly create a benign interaction mechanism, which ensures that tourist attractions can conduct a shareholding operation on the basis of their property rights, and may eventually re-establish a just “belief field” of the heritage-based rural tourism field.

Based on the research perspective of space production theory, this study conducts a case study of the nighttime economic agglomeration of the HWY Overseas Chinese Plaza in Pengjiang District, Jiangmen City of Guangdong Province, using qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews and text analysis. This study discusses the construction process of consumption space in urban nighttime economic agglomeration from the perspective of consumers. The research findings show that, first, with the development and promotion of nighttime economic agglomeration, consumers perceive authoritative prompts from the government and planners in the form of symbolic signs such as government policy documents, architecture and graphic texts, night lighting, and nighttime leisure activities. In addition, space image and regulatory guidelines function as the major capital factors of developers, influencing consumers and various other service providers. Consumers, on their part, show identity and compliance, which indicates that power and capital play a larger part in spatial practice and spatial representation. However, consumers are not passively tamed in space, and based on space perception, they interact with power and capital, gradually participating in the reproduction of space. Second, as representational space serves as an interaction between consumers’ cognition and practice, its internal mechanism has great significance for the development of nighttime economic agglomeration, which is manifested in the whole process of consumers’ gradual cognition of space through their own spatial perception. In conclusion, active players in power discourse and consumption discourse interact simultaneously in the space of nighttime economic agglomeration, thus creating a new spatial practice. Finally, the paper also discusses the future research direction of nighttime economic agglomeration, which has great value in promoting postmodern urban consumption space and the development of the nighttime economy.

To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the current situation and development process of festivals and special events, a hot field of tourism research, this paper gathers 1 287 festivals and special event-related CSSCI articles in the CNKI database from 1999 to 2019 using CiteSpace, a document visualization software to draw knowledge graphs of festivals and special events in terms of authors, research organizations, keywords, and so on. The results show that, first, domestic festival research can be roughly divided into four stages: the start-up stage (1999—2002), preliminary development stage (2003—2008), rapid rise stage (2009—2011), and steady development stage (2012—2019). In particular, the practical effects of large-scale domestic festivals and the guidelines of state policy documents are important factors that bring about changes in the themes and content of festival research. There are four major domestic research teams with an obvious lack of communication and cooperation. The research institutions mainly consist of sports education colleges, tourism colleges, and university research centers at the undergraduate level. Over time, they have expanded from universities in eastern coastal provinces to universities in inland provinces such as Sichuan, Chongqing, Shaanxi, Henan, and Hunan. Research academics have paid close attention to festivals, but the research perspective is still relatively limited, and the research content must be enriched. It is suggested that in the future, more attention should be paid to community festival activities, innovative research methods, research on festival-oriented education, social, cultural, and environmental impacts of festivals, and the analysis of failed festival cases.