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Regarding research on authenticity perception, this paper aims to pose the following questions: In different cultural regions, what are the different authenticity elements of old towns from a tourist perspective? What is the difference in authenticity perception in different cultural regions? How does the authenticity perception of old towns change in the tourismification process?

Combining eight cultural regions in China, this study focuses on 155 old towns to discuss the differences between authenticity perception of various old towns in different cultural regions and how the interactions between tourists and local places influence the perception of authenticity, with 11,387 user-generated photographs applied to interpret authenticity perception.

The study shows that the authenticity perceived by tourists varies greatly between farming and pastoral cultural regions; after authenticity loss, old towns with a long history of tourismification regain authenticity in tourists’ perception.

The findings could serve as a reference for tourism development and authenticity protection of old towns. Furthermore, the study explores a creative research method and theoretical framework for regional authenticity studies, which is significant in a global context. In the process of globalization, the implications of this study, including differences in authenticity perception within various cultural regions, will also be significant globally.

The overall purpose of this study is to utilize the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) in combination with four dark tourism constructs (dark experience, engaging entertainment, unique learning experience, and casual interest) to gain a better understanding of behaviors and intentions of tourists who have visited or plan to visit a dark tourism location.

A total of 1,068 useable questionnaires was collected via Qualtrics Panels for analysis purposes. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to verify satisfactory reliability and validity regarding the measurement of model fit. With adequate model fit, structural equation modeling was employed to determine positive and negative relationships between TPB and dark tourism constructs. In all, 11 hypotheses statements were tested within this study.

Results of this study indicate that tourists are curious, interested, and intrigued by dark experiences with paranormal activity, resulting in travel choices made for themselves based on personal beliefs and preferences, with minimal outside influence from others. It was determined that dark experience was the most influential of the dark tourism constructs tested in relationship to attitudes and subjective norm.

The data collected for this study were collected using Qualtrics Panels with self-reporting participants. The actual destination visited by survey participants was also not factored into the results of this research study.

This study provides a new theoretical research model that merges TPB and dark tourism constructs and established that there is a relationship between TPB constructs and dark tourism.

Effective post-disaster communication is essential for destination marketing organizations to encourage visitors following natural disasters. This research aimed to analyze the impact of two typical types of post-disaster communication messages – solidarity messages and testimonial messages – on post-disaster visiting intention. This research proposes effective communication strategies for post-disaster destination marketing.

For the case of Jiuzhai Valley, China, which experienced market recovery after two years of rebuilding following a 2017 earthquake, this study designed three contextual experiments based on post-disaster communication scenarios on the Internet and social media to test the causal chain between recovery message types and post-disaster visiting intentions. The data were analyzed using analysis of variance, independent samples t-tests, and the bootstrap method.

The results indicate that both solidarity messages and testimonial messages evoked higher visiting intention than the no-message group. However, solidarity messages (vs testimonial messages) were more effective when shared on the destination management organization's official account than when they were shared on an influencer's account, with their effects being mediated by the symbolic – as opposed to the hedonic – value of tourist behavior.

Destination management organizations should actively carry out marketing communication through the Internet and social media for areas that have experienced disasters. Crisis communicators should consider inviting popular social media influencers to visit the destination and share their experiences to enhance market confidence, while also paying more attention to the operation of official social media accounts.

This study sheds light on the use of the Internet and social media as tools for post-disaster marketing. By expanding on post-disaster communication theory, this study fills a research gap regarding the effectiveness of tourism marketing strategies after a crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) strategy and its role of industrial productivity in China.

To identify the causal effect of this strategy on industrial sustainable development, the authors first use the slacks-based measure model to calculate industries’ total-factor productivity (TFP) considered with CO₂ emissions as undesirable output on the provincial level. Then, the authors use the PSM-DID method to identify the difference of TFPs between provinces and industries before and after the implementation of SREB strategy.

However, the authors find that there is no difference or even a relative decrease in TFPs of industries in target provinces after the implementation of the strategy, which reveals that the SREB strategy does not play a positive role of the industries’ sustainable development in years of 2014 and 2015.

The value of this result is to identify the short-term impact of SREB strategy and to seek for probable causes and appropriate solutions.

Up to date development in sentiment analysis has resulted in a symbolic growth in the volume of study, especially on more subjective text types, namely, product or movie reviews. The key difference between these texts with news articles is that their target is defined and unique across the text. Hence, the reviews on newspaper articles can deal with three subtasks: correctly spotting the target, splitting the good and bad content from the reviews on the concerned target and evaluating different opinions provided in a detailed manner. On defining these tasks, this paper aims to implement a new sentiment analysis model for article reviews from the newspaper.

Here, tweets from various newspaper articles are taken and the sentiment analysis process is done with pre-processing, semantic word extraction, feature extraction and classification. Initially, the pre-processing phase is performed, in which different steps such as stop word removal, stemming, blank space removal are carried out and it results in producing the keywords that speak about positive, negative or neutral. Further, semantic words (similar) are extracted from the available dictionary by matching the keywords. Next, the feature extraction is done for the extracted keywords and semantic words using holoentropy to attain information statistics, which results in the attainment of maximum related information. Here, two categories of holoentropy features are extracted: joint holoentropy and cross holoentropy. These extracted features of entire keywords are finally subjected to a hybrid classifier, which merges the beneficial concepts of neural network (NN), and deep belief network (DBN). For improving the performance of sentiment classification, modification is done by inducing the idea of a modified rider optimization algorithm (ROA), so-called new steering updated ROA (NSU-ROA) into NN and DBN for weight update. Hence, the average of both improved classifiers will provide the classified sentiment as positive, negative or neutral from the reviews of newspaper articles effectively.

Three data sets were considered for experimentation. The results have shown that the developed NSU-ROA + DBN + NN attained high accuracy, which was 2.6% superior to particle swarm optimization, 3% superior to FireFly, 3.8% superior to grey wolf optimization, 5.5% superior to whale optimization algorithm and 3.2% superior to ROA-based DBN + NN from data set 1. The classification analysis has shown that the accuracy of the proposed NSU − DBN + NN was 3.4% enhanced than DBN + NN, 25% enhanced than DBN and 28.5% enhanced than NN and 32.3% enhanced than support vector machine from data set 2. Thus, the effective performance of the proposed NSU − ROA + DBN + NN on sentiment analysis of newspaper articles has been proved.

This paper adopts the latest optimization algorithm called the NSU-ROA to effectively recognize the sentiments of the newspapers with NN and DBN. This is the first work that uses NSU-ROA-based optimization for accurate identification of sentiments from newspaper articles.

This paper aims to explore the changing pedagogic discourses in China today, using the current wave of English curriculum innovation as a focused case. Given the cross-cultural nature of foreign language education, the change in the English as a foreign language curriculum in China has served as a fertile ground for different pedagogical ideas to emerge and to cross. The new English curriculum in China has endorsed a more communicative and humanistic view of language teaching, encouraging teachers to adopt a task-based approach to organize their classroom teaching. The new English curriculum has aroused a heated debate among Chinese scholars on the suitability of such a Western curriculum idea in the Chinese educational context on the basis of its relation to the Confucian tradition of education, the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context of China and the danger of post-colonialist imposition.

A critique is conducted on the three areas of controversies by situating the debate in the larger context of the cross-cultural understanding of the Chinese pedagogic discourse in the process of globalization and internationalization.

It is important for China to resist the homogenizing effect of globalization and internationalization in the area of curriculum development; however, being defensive and protective of one’s own and dismissive of others has not been and should not be the attitude of Chinese curriculum reform. The evolution of Chinese pedagogy is not only a result of Western influence but also a result of social change in the process of industrialization (Cheng, 2011). Global trends and national traditions should not be taken as extremes in an incompatible and irreconcilable dichotomy.

The three areas of debates on the new English curriculum can serve as a good lens into the evolving curriculum discourses in China. They reflect the cultural–historical, contextual and critical considerations among Chinese educational scholars in the national curriculum innovation efforts.