An Empowerment Perspective on Rural Tourism for Sustainable Traditional Villages: Evidence from Yunqiu Mountain Village, Shanxi, China

Background: Traditional villages are important carriers of China’s agrarian civilization, and rural tourism has increasingly been promoted as a strategy for local economic revitalization. In this context, governments have introduced external developers and encouraged village–enterprise integration as a community-based governance arrangement, raising questions about its implications for community empowerment. Methods: Guided by sustainable development and empowerment theory, this study adopts a qualitative case study approach to examine the impacts of rural tourism on traditional village communities and the constraints shaping these outcomes. Results: Drawing on empirical evidence from Yunqiu Mountain Village, the findings indicate that rural tourism generates a simultaneous process of empowerment and disempowerment across economic, social, psychological, and political dimensions, with political empowerment remaining particularly weak. Conclusions: The analysis further reveals that the rural collective land system, marked by diluted property rights, together with limited and ineffective community participation mechanisms, constitutes key institutional constraints on community empowerment. By highlighting the dynamic process of “empowerment–disempowerment” under China’s specific institutional arrangements, this study contributes to tourism impact research and provides empirical insights into the contextual applicability of empowerment theory in traditional village tourism development.