Tourism Regulation, Resident Satisfaction and Sustainable Rural Tourism: A Chinese Case

Abstract

Against the UN 2030 SDGs framework, rural tourism facilitates inclusive growth (SDG8), sustainable communities (SDG11), and inclusive governance (SDG16). Resident satisfaction bridges tourism regulation, commercial operation, and destination sustainability. Most prior studies treat satisfaction as a passive outcome of tourism growth and lack an integrated empirical framework that combines tourism law, benefit distribution, and multidimensional resident perceptions. This study constructs a six-dimensional resident satisfaction system that covers economic benefits, living environment, cultural inheritance, government services, community identity, and personal development. Based on 264 valid resident questionnaires from Liulaozhuang Village (a tourism site in Northern Jiangsu), we apply reliability and validity tests, correlation analysis, and multiple regression to explore how satisfaction shapes sustainable tourism development. Regression results show that all six dimensions are positively associated with perceived sustainable rural tourism development (β = 0.198–0.284, p < 0.01), jointly explaining 58.2% of its variance (adjusted R² = 0.582); government service satisfaction was the strongest predictor (β = 0.284), whereas personal development satisfaction combined the lowest mean score (M = 3.21) with the second-strongest association (β = 0.271), a “low satisfaction–high association” configuration. The data expose institutional drawbacks: unfair revenue sharing, weak legal protection for resident participation, insufficient support for tourism micro-firms, and a lack of long-term ecological supervision rules. The study embeds tourism regulation and micro-enterprise operation logic within a resident satisfaction framework, adds the dimensions of personal development and community identity, and provides micro-level evidence from a government-led tourism destination. These findings inform evidence-based governance pathways, statutory benefit-sharing rules, resident hearing mechanisms, micro-enterprise incubation, and long-term ecological monitoring. They can be applied to other government-led cultural tourism destinations in developing countries.