Honggen Xiao

A Chinese Canadian working in Hong Kong, Honggen Xiao, PhD., initially graduated from Fujian Normal University and Soochow University respectively, and engaged in tourism education and research, from a social sciences and humanities perspective, in the Department of Tourism at Huaqiao University from 1989-2001. During this period, he has spent one year as a visiting scholar in the College of Tourism at Rikkyo University, Japan. Prior to joining The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, he immigrated to Canada to undertake doctoral studies and research in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. In the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (HKPU), he facilitates learning at undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels in subject areas such as qualitative data analysis, leisure and society, tourism and culture, China tourism, multidisciplinary approaches to tourism, and theories and concepts in tourism. He has extensive interests in tourism research. In particular, he has been developing a focused area of research on knowledge development and scientific community in tourism and hospitality, which mainly addresses the tensions of knowledge from the perspectives of theory development (or theoretical state-of-the-art), theory and practice (or the nurturing of communities of learning and practice), and dissemination of knowledge across language communities. In addition, he has been actively engaged in community service through sitting in committees and editorial boards of journals, reviewing submissions for periodicals and conferences, organizing forums, consulting for governmental/non-governmental organizations, co-editing the Springer (2016) Encyclopedia of Tourism, and more recently, acting as managing editor for the Journal of China Tourism Research (a Routledge publication).