Rethinking Chinese health and wellness tourism: a cultural-geographic perspective

This commentary critically examines contemporary Chinese wellness tourism research from a cultural-geographical perspective, highlighting its contributions to tourism geography. First, it shows how the Chinese social-cultural context enriches the diversity of health and wellness tourism landscapes. Second, it advances a relational understanding of the tourism–place–health nexus by elucidating how local cultural frameworks mediate these interactions. Third, it challenges entrenched dichotomies in tourism geography knowledge production, such as everyday versus non-everyday, East versus West, and tradition versus modernity. Fourth, it offers intersectional insights by integrating tourism geography with age, gender, and income studies. Building on these contributions, the commentary also proposes targeted directions for future research on health and wellness tourism.