Abstract: In this paper, we have constructed the nonparametric decomposition framework to measure the growth drivers of tourism economy, and the drivers were analyzed and calculated based on the input and output data of the tourism industry in 30 provinces of China from 2005 to 2012. The results show that the contribution of TFP (total factor productivity) has been gradually overtaking that of the factor inputs in this period and became the main driver of economic growth of Chinese tourism, with its corresponding contribution rate jumping from 49.01% in 2006 to 82.18% in 2012. Technological progress was the key to the escalation of such a contribution, while technical efficiency, especially the scale efficiency within it, had a relatively smaller and slipping contribution to the tourism economic growth. Moreover, the contribution of pure technical efficiency was almost negligible, sliding from 50.99% in 2006 to 26.52% in 2012. The drivers of tourism economic growth differed from region to region, with the middle and western regions growing faster than the eastern region. The rise of tourism economy in central China was mainly driven by scale efficiency, while that in the western region was mostly driven by pure technical efficiency, which could be further divided into two distinct phases according to the different driving factors. The first phase was driven by factor input in the 2005-2008 period and the second phase by TFP in the 2009-2012 period. The tourism economic growth of China became increasingly intensive from 2006 to 2012, when the contribution of TFP surpassed that of factor inputs and the growth relied even more on TFP.