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The purpose of this study is to investigate the recovery and resilience tourism strategies and possible future development of four main Chinese tourism cities.

The authors collected data from the official accounts of tourism administrations of these cities, tourist attractions and opinions from media and newspapers in Sina Weibo platform. The authors adopted an inductive approach in observing relevant social media posts and applied content analysis to identify main China’s tourism prevention and recovery strategies.

During the mass pandemic infection period, top-down prevention and control measures were implemented by the Chinese central and local governments, with feasible and regional recovery policies and protocols being adapted according to local situations. Measures related to tourism industrial re-employment, improvement of international images and governmental financial supports to re-boost local tourism in Chinese cities were paid great attention. Digitalization, close-to-nature and cultural heritages became important factors in the future development of China’s tourism. Dark tourism, as a potential tourism recovery strategy, also obtained huge emergence, for the memory of people deceased in the pandemic and for the inheritance of national patriotism.

This study enriches the current literature in urban tourism recovery studies analyzing the specific case of Chinese tourism cities and fulfill some voids of previous research mostly focused on the first wave of the pandemic and the recovery strategies mainly of Western cities. It also provides valuable suggestions to tourism practitioners, destinations and urban cities in dealing with regional tourism recession and finding possible solutions for the scenario associated to the COVID-19 and other similar health crisis.