Tourism development in rural China today brings both opportunities and challenges for local communities. To thrive or even adapt in this new and rapidly changing environment, communities need to be resilient in order to maintain successful livelihoods. This paper examines the core issue in this dynamic coping process. After a substantial literature review, an Agency-based Livelihood Resilience Framework is developed and used to examine two communities in rural China. The role of agency in shaping community resilience is specifically emphasized in this framework. Face-to-face interviews and participatory observation methodologies were adopted in the case studies in order to identify changes caused by external investment, villagers’ actions to deal with the changes, and the social structures behind these actions. We found that the two villages demonstrated different levels of resilience, and that this can be explained by differences in individual agency. However, both villages failed to transform into a system which can thrive in the new environment due to a lack of collective agency. Agency, especially collective agency, is vital for structural change in communities, but it was limited by certain context-specific factors in the two cases.

Festive sport events provide an opportunity for people to engage in leisure in an atmosphere of celebration. It has become increasingly popular in China. Although motivations have been explored thoroughly in the context of participant and recreational sport, events, and festivals, no research has yet focused on the overlap among these domains. To address the gap, this study is an investigation of what motivates people to participate in festive sport events as an emerging subcategory of more traditional events and festivals. After the development of a new motives scale, a questionnaire was administered to 894 participants in a festive sport event for hikers in China. The sample was split in three to validate the scale using factor analysis. Six participant motives in the context of a festive sport event emerged including Physical Health, Achievement, Socialization, Mental Health, Novelty/Excitement, and Culture/Event. Important implications of this study are also discussed.

This paper follows the call for a “mobility turn” in the social sciences and attempts to understand the relationship between the annual Spring Festival homecoming and wellbeing by focusing on student mobility. Sixteen students are selected; their movements for two weeks around the Spring Festival are tracked, and their experiences are solicited in interviews. The relationship of interest is explored in three dimensions: physical movement, social connections and contextual shifts. The results show that students are eager to pursue an ideal home for their wellbeing but do not always obtain positive wellbeing. In reality, they face both physical and mental contradictions.