Abstract: Based on the prefecture-level data of inbound tourism population and relative economic statistics, this paper investigates the evolution and its factors of the spatial distribution disparity and its interior structure of inbound tourism size in China using Gini coefficient and principal component regression model in 1999-2008. The conclusions are drawn as follows: 1) On the whole, the spatial disparity remains large but becomes smaller and smaller in China and the Three Zones in the past 10 years, and the evolutions of interior structure for the different sizes are consistent with its whole trend. On the other hand, as the sizes increase, the imbalance of spatial distribution is smaller, while the dispersive trend is more significant. 2) The change between the imbalance of spatial distribution and the dispersive trend remains samilar in different spatial levels. As a whole, the spatial disparity is largest in the Western Zone, and is smallest in the Middle Zone. While the dispersive trend is most significant in the Middle Zone, and is most inapparent in the West Zone. On the same time, the analysis on the provincial disparity and its evolution testify the above conclusions. Then the distribution type is presented based on the provincial disparity and its evolution. But the situation becomes slightly complicated. The spatial disparity is largest in the Eastern Zone when the size is above 10 000 person-time, and the dispersive trend is most significant in the Western Zone when the size is 200 000 person-time. 3) The positive relation is existed between the spatial distribution change of inbound tourist size and tourism development condition improvement. In the transition period of the holistic development of local tourism industry and the structural change of tourist demand, the influences of the factors, such as economic development, industry structure optimizing, the degree of economic open, market development and infrastructure construction and so on, are more and more significant for reducing the spatial disparity of local inbound tourism size, indicating that the mechanism of tourism development has been drived by multi-factors.