1.6 Hangzhou's MICE Development

The MICE industry in Hangzhou has a long history. In 1929, from June to October, one of China's earliest international expositions—‘West Lake Expo' was hosted in Hangzhou. This exposition lasted about four months and attracted 20 million visitors, and more than 147.6 thousand items were shown during the exposition. This exposition was a landmark in the Chinese MICE development history. In 2000, Hangzhou government decided to resume the West Lake Expo annually, for which it has done successfully. The West Lake Expo and the MICE industry have thus become an important factor in Hangzhou's economic development strategy. According to Fu (2005), in 2001, Hangzhou hosted 109 exhibitions in total, among which 25% were accounted for by the West Lake Expo which has become the leading MICE business in Hangzhou. Based on the success of the West Lake Expo, in 2006 and 2011 the World Leisure Expo were held in Hangzhou. According to World Leisure Expo (2006), there were more than 100 events, exhibitions or festivals during the exposition period in 2006, and the expo received 15million domestic tourists and one million international tourists. The G20 Summit was also hosted in Hangzhou in 2016. More international events will be held in Hangzhou such as the 2018 FINA World Short Course Swimming Championships, the 2022 Asian Games, etc.

Destination's capability to successfully host MICE has long been a prerequisite for longterm success, and a key factor is the role of local government and its MICE planners. To make MICE more sustainable, many appropriate policy instruments were enacted by Hangzhou's local government. The following are five international conference centres in Hangzhou: Hangzhou International Conference Center, Hangzhou International Expo Center, Zhejiang World Trade International Exhibition Center, Hangzhou Peace International Conference and Exhibition Center, and Hangzhou Baima Lake International Convention and Exhibition Center. These large conference centres intend to lead the Hangzhou MICE industry into a new stage of development.

The conference centre fits alongside various events and festivals that take place on the Labour Day, National Day, and Spring Festival vacations. Hangzhou is thus developing a portfolio of tourism events which potentially yields many benefits for the city's residents. However, while economic data generally point to increases in visitor numbers and expenditure, and hence job creation, of importance too are whether soft gains are being perceived by Hangzhou's residents. Do they feel that Hangzhou is gaining additional prestige, not only in China, but on the world stage? Do they take pride in such developments? To what extent will they tolerate the disruptions caused by the construction work in the city? Do they directly benefit from these developments, or do they feel that others benefit, but perhaps not themselves? These are the types of questions that the research is directed to.

Due to Hangzhou's rapid economic and tourism development, the MICE industry plays an important role in the city's economy. This book uses Hangzhou as the ‘base' example and case to explore the local residents' perceptions of and demand for Chinese MICE events.

In the research, it was found that international event development is a challenging but strategically important segment for the local economy. Previous studies on the events' impact analysis suggest that they have favourable effects on the local economy, society, and the sustainable development. Nearing the end to completing the book, lots of research on events have started to focus on the less-researched areas like residents' perception, local cultural protection, etc. For example, in the study of Kim, Prideaux and Chon (2010), they concluded five basic event research classifications: motivation and goals for the event participants' arrival; residents' and non-residents' participation in the events; the economic impact of festivals or other similar special events; evaluation of the effectiveness of methods used in the economic impact analysis; and the impact of socio-demographic and cultural factors on the expenses of the events' participants. It should be noted that apart from the assessment of the economic impact of the organised events, studies of assessment of the socio-cultural (Deery & Jago, 2010; Walker et al., 2013), environmental (Sherwood, 2007), and the altogether economic-social-environmental factors (Andersson & Lundberg, 2013) of the organised events were undertaken. Thus the relationships occurring between the quality of events and their value and the experienced satisfaction and loyalty (Kim et al., 2010), satisfaction with participation in the event, the experienced satisfaction and, consequently, the creation of loyalty (Yoon, Lee & Lee, 2010) were also be examined.

In addition, the 2016 G20 Summit of the world's major economies was hosted in Hangzhou. This magnificent conference not only enhanced Hangzhou's image to a higher international level, but also increased local residents' pride in the city. In this situation, local residents' perceptions may have changed, which provides room for the future research.The author will focus on the local residents' perceptions of mega events in the future.