The work focuses on local poor people. It identifies the correlation between tourism and poverty alleviation by tracing the cash flows to the local poor, reviews the social and environmental effects of tourism on the local area and establishes a community-based sustainable tourism-eliminating poverty strategy framework. One of most impor­tant findings is that local households do get benefits from tourism development but the poor people have the substantial disadvantages in sharing this benefit. The case study region in China is a typical representation of the combination and overlapping of the multiple needs for tourism development, poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation, which are faced by many other developing countries in the world, it is expected that the findings and recommendations can be applied to other regions in China, other developing countries, as well as disadvantage groups in some developed countries.