Asean International Chinese students' perceived images of Guangxi as a culturel tourism destination

Destination marketers worked very hard to develop marketing strategies that target different tourist groups to enhance the competitiveness of the destinations. One strategy is to create favorable images among international Chinese students in China who could further promote China’s cultural tourism to the rest of the world. The Guangxi government realized the role of international Chinese students in promoting its image as a cultural tourism destination to attract more ASEAN tourists. For that reason, this study aims to construct a new research framework to examine the factors that influence the perceived image of Guangxi’s cultural tourism among international Chinese students from ASEAN countries. The framework is based on the cognitive-affective-conative (CAC) model of perceived image and incorporates several variables including informational familiarity, experiential familiarity, motivation, and cultural attachment as external influences on perceived images. The respondents for this study were 525 students who enrolled at various universities in Guangxi and were identified as international Chinese students from ASEAN countries. The study has successfully achieved the research objectives of testing the relationships between all relevant variables. This included verifying the effects of the four external dimensions of informational familiarity, experiential familiarity, motivation, and cultural attachment on perceived images, as well as analyzing the relationships among the three internal elements of perceived images: cognitive, affective, and conative images. Almost all of the main hypotheses were confirmed using multiple regression analyses, except for the effect of motivation on the conative image. In conclusion, the theoretical implication of this study will be the integration of tourism and psychology disciplines, and the development of a new research framework for understanding the factors that influence perceived images. The findings of this study can also assist the Guangxi government in formulating better strategies to attract ASEAN tourists by utilizing international Chinese students as the market bridge.