Problems in developing bun festival tourism in Hong Kong

The objective of this study is to discuss on tourism and local development via evaluating an ambivalent case of traditional festival revival and tourism development in Hong Kong: Bun Festival tourism in Cheung Chau Island. The importance of this study is to put into relief the impact of “cultural sustainability”-an evaluative factor that is very insufficiently emphasized and theorized in present critical studies of tourism development. I will show although the most often mobilized critiques against heritage tourism development, as well as cultural inauthenticity, commercialization, deficient in local economic development, and local disempowerment, which can be applied to the case of the Bun Festival tourism, particular social circumstances weaken the force of these critiques in the Hong Kong case. In Hong Kong critical commentators are not entirely against it. Many inhabitants of the Cheung Chau Island grant the neoliberal direction of current tourist development and derive economic benefits from it. Neoliberal exploitation of heritage tourism resources threatens the cultural sustainability of historically rooted local practices of the Bun Festival and in turn threatens the viability of Bun Festival tourism in the long run. This revise will also point to facts and opinion that bare a serious and neglected problem in Bun Festival tourism.