Abstract
Tourism is becoming more and more important in the global economy, and its longterm prosperity is desired by every tourism destination. Prosperity, however, cannot be achieved successfully without the involvement of those influenced by the industry, so, evaluating residents’ perceptions of tourism and involving them in as many aspects of planning and policymaking as possible are important steps in creating sustainability in tourism destination development. In attempting to fill in the research gaps in social impact analysis of urban tourism development in the Chinese context, a face-to-face survey was carried out to explore residents’ perceived impacts of tourism development in Harbin, a famous tourist destination in north-eastern China. The findings of this survey suggest that residents’ reaction towards local tourism development varies between different interest groups. Age, income and personal connections with local tourism were found to influence residents’ perceptions to some extent.