How does China promote balanced regional development through the ATA system? Institutional compensation mechanism of the tourism industry

This study focuses on China’s institutional innovation with distinctive national characteristics, the A-grade Tourist Attraction (ATA) system. It reveals that the ATA system essentially serves as a balanced governance tool integrating landscape recreation services with cross-regional and urban-rural policy regulation. However, current research has overlooked fundamental explanations of ATA’s intrinsic nature as a political-economic instrument. By analysing the evolutionary process and diffusion patterns of China’s ATA network, this study demonstrates how the Chinese government employs ATA brand authorization to implement differentiated policy incentives for tourism economy, thereby addressing optimization challenges of China’s uneven economic landscape. This study reveals that China’s ATA system has evolved through three distinct phases: growth pole cultivation, core-periphery diffusion, and comprehensive coordinated development. Its evolutionary mechanisms manifest through spatial compensation and graded compensation. The spatial evolution of the ATA system demonstrates policy-driven hotspot emergence and multi-tier differentiation, exhibiting strong alignment with national strategic zones and revealing a hierarchical development pattern that reflects vertical interventions across central government-strategic development areas-local governance levels. This hierarchical intervention, alongside variables like population agglomeration, transportation infrastructure, and topographical conditions, embodies China’s strategy to unleash resource value in tourism zones through transport network construction and population policy regulation. This mechanism uses policy leverage to transcend market limitations, creating opportunities for underdeveloped regions. The study innovatively proposes a cross-scale framework for certification systems, expanding understanding of policy tourism instruments and providing a reference framework for developing nations to resolve the growth-equity paradox.