Urban and rural tourism under COVID-19 in China: research on the recovery measures and tourism development

Purpose COVID-19 has severely affected urban and rural tourism in China, which has been extensively reported in the newspapers. This paper aims to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on urban and rural tourism at each critical juncture of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the studies, measures and attitudes of various stakeholders toward urban and rural tourism and their future development. Design/methodology/approach This paper collects Chinese news reports as the research object and uses ROST Content Mining 6.0 and Gephi software to analyze and visualize the data for high-frequency words and analyzed the discourse of stakeholders within the newspaper text. Findings This study found that prior to February 20, 2020, the Chinese Government mainly focused on pandemic prevention. From February 21 to April 3 (before The Qingming Festival), resumption of work and production became the theme. From April 4 to May 1 (before May Day), a time-sharing reservation system was widely implemented and the differentiation between urban and rural tourism became more prominent. After May 1, rural tourism attracted greater attention. Originality/value This paper uses discourse analysis to understand the impact of COVID-19 on urban and rural tourism from the perspective of time nodes and the relationship between various stakeholders and predicts the development trends within urban and rural tourism. This paper enriches and expands tourism management knowledge in the face of major crises, providing valuable advice for managers and investors and makes suggestions for the development of urban and rural tourism.