The COVID-19 epidemic spread around the world in 2020, and this public health emergency had a huge and far-reaching impact on the socioeconomic development of all countries, especially the tourism industry [1]. Due to lockdown measures, travel restrictions, economic recession, and other impacts, global tourism activities have declined unprecedentedly, tourism economic benefits have been reduced across the board, and the unemployment rate is increasing, facing unprecedented threats and challenges [2]. According to the World Tourism Economy Trends Report (2022) released by the World Tourism Cities Federation and the Tourism Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the total number of global tourist trips in 2021 reached 6.60 billion, and the total revenue of global tourism reached USD 3.3 trillion, only 53.7% and 55.9% of those in 2019, respectively [3]. Tourism has a strong comprehensiveness and sensitivity. Political, economic, and natural disasters as well as other external environmental changes often have a direct impact on tourism, so it shows more nonlinear fluctuations and periodic evolution ^[4][5][4,5]. Historically, China’s tourism industry suffered from several major emergencies, such as the Asian financial crisis, SARS, Wenchuan earthquake, and global economic crisis, often accompanied by negative impacts such as the loss of economic benefits, decline in tourism arrivals, destruction of infrastructure, and negative tourism image [6]. Although tourism statistics fluctuate greatly in the short term, China’s tourism economy still maintains stable growth in the long term. A single shock has not imposed a permanent impact on the growth trend of China’s tourism economy, which always manages to bottom out and regain some sort of equilibrium or steady state [7]. As the largest consumer of outbound tourism in the world, China is also an important tourist destination and source market in the world, occupying an important position in the global tourism pattern. It is vital to promote the sustainable and healthy development of China’s tourism economy. Since the 21st century, faced with increasingly frequent and normalized crisis events around the world, economic theories have advocated a shift from risk mitigation strategies to prioritizing economic resilience [8]. Therefore, resilience provides a new development concept for the tourism economy to effectively cope with various emergencies and challenges and maintain and improve economic vitality.

Initially, there was no theory related to “resilience” in mainstream economics until Reggiani (2002) introduced the concept of resilience into the study of spatial economics, after which economic resilience was widely used as an analytical concept ^[9][12]. Early studies mostly emphasize the resistance and recoverability of economies to external shocks. For example, Pike et al. (2010) define economic resilience as the ability of a regional economy to maintain a pre-existing state (typically assumed to be an equilibrium state) in the presence of some type of exogenous shock ^[10][13]. With the intervention of evolutionary economic geography, the dynamic evolutionary capacities of economies in crisis arouse the attention of scholars. For example, Simmie (2010), Shaw et al. (2013), and Boschma et al. (2015) all argue that resilience includes not only the successful recovery of the economy from shocks but also the change in its original growth path and the finding of a new growth path, which is a kind of transformation and upgrading ability ^[11][12][13][14,15,16]. Conversely, Martin et al. (2015) believe that economic resilience is an adaptive resilience, which is the dynamic adjustment ability of economic adaptability ^[14][17]. It is evident that there is no uniform concept of economic resilience in academia, but there is a general consensus on three important capabilities it possesses, namely the ability to withstand external shocks, the ability to respond positively to shocks, and the long-term adaptability to forge new development paths ^[15][18].

The existing evaluation system on economic resilience can be roughly divided into two categories ^[16][19]. One is the comprehensive evaluation of economic resilience by constructing an indicator system ^[17][20]. Some scholars believe that economic resilience is a composite concept involving many aspects, which needs to be measured by constructing an indicator system ^[18][21]. For example, Briguglio (2009) was the first to construct an economic resilience evaluation indicator system that includes four aspects—economic stability, market efficiency, economic governance, and social development—based on the understanding that the resilience of a country’s economy depends on its own resistance and external policy guidance ^[19][22]. Wang et al. (2021) started from the concept of economic resilience and evaluated regional economic resilience from three dimensions: resistance capacity, adjustment capacity, and response capacity ^[20][23]. As the selection of related indicators has not been unified, the construction of indicator systems varies greatly, and the measurement results are always controversial ^[21][24]. The other is to measure economic resilience by constructing a correlation index ^[22][25]. Usually, a core variable is selected to represent its change in the face of shock disturbance and the change degree of this core variable before and after shock is compared with the frontier explanatory model. For example, Martin et al. (2016) use the national employment growth rate to calculate the expected employment level of a region and measure the regional economic resilience using the difference between the expected and actual values. The measure reflects the resilience of the economic system in response to short-term shocks ^[23][26], which has been widely recognized by the academic community ^[24][25][27,28].

The resilience improvement in the economic system is driven by a combination of factors ^[26][29]. Based on empirical studies, scholars have discussed the factors affecting the economic resilience of several countries in Europe and the United States, arguing that external shocks such as economic crises, business failures, and internal disturbances such as industrial recession and climate change are important factors in regional resilience changes ^[27][30]. It is also pointed out that the regional ability to sustain professional technical knowledge innovation, a good institutional environment, and a diversified supply chain network exert a positive impact on regional economic resilience ^[28][29][30][31,32,33]. On this basis, Capello et al. (2015) emphasize that changes in location conditions, the agglomeration effect of growth poles, innovation system, and city scale and function will have an impact on regional economic resilience ^[31][34]. Sensier et al. (2016) believe that the improvement in research and development (R&D) and technological innovation is conducive to resisting economic crises ^[32][35]. Martin (2016) further put forward the analysis framework of influencing factors of regional economic resilience comprehensively from the perspectives of industrial structure, labor force, finance, and institutions ^[23][26].

The tourism industry has become one of the industries with the strongest development momentums and largest scale in the global economy, as well as one of the most labor-intensive industries, directly and indirectly driving large-scale employment worldwide ^[33][36]. However, the risks associated with environmental uncertainty have led to a slowdown in the tourism industry, especially with the outbreak of COVID-19, which has brought the global tourism industry to a prolonged “standstill”, shrinking employment opportunities, plummeting employment rates, and reversing sustainable development progress ^[34][37]. However, some studies have also proved that the tourism industry can often rebound quickly after a shock, or even “turn crisis into opportunity”, which fits the concept of resilience [7]. Since the mid-1990s, the concept of resilience has been gradually extended to the field of tourism as global environmental change and sustainable development ideas continue to advance, forging a new path for academics to study complex tourism systems ^[35][38]. As an ever-evolving complex system, the tourism industry has a high degree of industrial relevance and a more complex state of regional resilience ^[36][39]. Most studies on resilience in the tourism field are based on crisis management and posit that the system has the ability to adapt, respond, and evolve ^[37][38][40,41]. Meanwhile, as a social ecosystem, the tourism industry often faces different crisis situations in its development, which breaks the original development of the tourism economic system, making it enter a recessionary trajectory or successfully adapt to transformation to a new form of prosperity. That is, the resilience of the economic system of tourism constantly migrates as the crisis situation changes ^[39][42], and whether this migration is good or bad, most scholars believe that it depends mainly on the resistance and recoverability of system functions and structures ^[23][40][26,43]. Based on a comprehensive review of studies on resilience, Wang et al. (2021) propose that tourism destination resilience is the ability of tourism destinations to resist, adapt, and self-organize against interference ^[41][44], which further proves the point. Roberto et al. (2015) establish a composite index from the perspective of demand side and supply side to discuss the economic performance of Italian tourism under the influence of the financial crisis ^[42][45]. Sheppard et al. (2016) find that individual resilience would affect the resilience of tourism communities, and enhanced factors, such as cognitive ability, emotional motivation, physical health status, and emotional management ability based on individual resilience, would also affect the resilience of tourism communities ^[43][46]. King et al. (2021) believe that livelihood capital is an important factor affecting the resilience of tourism destinations ^[44][47]. Stefan (2015) proposes that tourism areas are complex and potential adaptive systems based on the theory of complex adaptive systems, and diversity is a key condition for tourism areas to develop adaptive capacity ^[45][48].

To sum up, the current studies on tourism resilience mainly focus on tourism destinations, including community resilience ^{[35][46][47][48][49][50]}[38,49,50,51,52,53], environmental resilience ^[51][54], and socio-ecological resilience ^[49][52][52,55]. There are few studies on the resilience of the economic system of tourism. In addition, the analysis of tourism resilience mainly focuses on small- and medium-sized scales, such as provinces ^[51][53][54,56], urban agglomerations ^[54][57], and cities ^[55][56][58,59], while there are few large-scale studies at the national level. From the perspective of research methods, most research methods on tourism resilience are qualitative research, employing case analyses ^[57][58][60,61], questionnaire surveys ^[59][62], and semi-structured interviews ^[43][60][46,63], while quantitative research is relatively rare. Studies on influencing factors of tourism resilience tend to focus on a specific field, lacking quantitative analysis on the size of influencing factors ^[61][64].

The resilience level has become a key indicator to measure the development of the tourism economy and an important guarantee for the sustainable development of China’s tourism industry ^[62][65].