Abstract: Taking the total tourism income as a measurement index, this paper adopts the traditional and spatial Markov chain analysis method to study the evolution characteristics of the imbalance development of China’s regional tourism industry from 1997 to 2015. The results show that the imbalance of regional tourism development in China is manifested to be the imbalance in the three major regions being significantly larger than the imbalance between the three regions; the development of regional tourism has relatively stable low-level and high-level convergence clubs and significant spatial clustering correlation. The probability of regional tourism transfer and the spatial spillover effect between the neighboring regions are closely related to the level of tourism development between neighboring regions.

Key words: regional tourism; imbalance; spatial spillover effect