Illustration: Liu Rui

Several days ago I saw a news report that many tourist sites in China were planning to raise entrance fees during China's National Day holidays.

For instance, Stone Forest, a tourist site in Yunnan famous for its unique karst landscape, is expected to increase its entrance fee per visitor from 140 yuan to 200 yuan ($29.30).

Although the managers of these sites explained their decision by saying that they were aimed at restricting the number of tourists and thus protecting the sites, the explanation is against common sense.

For most employees in China, the holidays following the National Day and several other festivals are the only periods they can travel for sightseeing. Given this fact, the price hike is quite unlikely to discouraging them from traveling to tourist and scenic sites. Instead, it will only result in much higher income from entrance fees.

The managers of these sites are too eager to make a lot of money in the "Golden Week," a Chinese nickname for the long holidays, but are too shy to admit their real intentions.

For this reason, claims of protecting their sites from too many visitors has long been used as a fi g leaf to cover up their motives.

However, what lies behind the price hikes is not only the managers, but also local governments that rely heavily on the entrance fees to get tax revenues.

Ratification from the local government is mandatory if a site wishes to raise the entrance fee. Local government off cials also want the site to get more revenue from entrance fee, from which taxes can be levied. It is this mechanism that drives the site and local off cials into an alliance.

People may wonder why local officials care so much about tax revenues from entrance fees. If the entrance fees are too high, the number of visitors will decrease, causing the income of hotels, restaurants and other service providers to drop, and resulting in a decrease in the tax revenue from them, which might be larger than the tax revenue from entrance fees.

I thought the same before I gave a lecture to a group of taxation off cials from a tourist city in Southwest China, one of whom gave a detailed explanation to me.

He said that tourist sites are usually big taxpayers, compared with which hotels and restaurants are only small and scattered taxpayers.

It is much more feasible for tax offi cials to supervise one big taxpayer and get reliable revenue from it, than to oversee 100 small taxpayers that can generate possibly higher but much less reliable tax revenues. As for the smaller taxpayers like hotels and restaurants, the local tax officials would rather require them to pay a fi xed tax each month, regardless of their actual income, believing this to be a wise choice.

However, local governments' choice of high entrance fees for tourist sites is a poor one in the long-term

With tourists becoming more experienced, many of them have gradually found that staying at a beautiful site longer brings them more joy than visiting one site after another.

As in developed countries, travel for sightseeing will be gradually replaced by travel for leisure, though the pace of change is relatively slow.

The day will come when tax revenues from hotels and restaurants are far greater than those from entrance fees. tourist sites managers and local governments off cials need to understand the inevitability of the transfer from sightseeing tourism to leisure tourism.

Focusing only on entrance fees is a shortsighted choice.

Jia Wen is an associate professor at the School of Economics, Sichuan University.

His blog is : http://blog.huanqiu. com/?jiawen