Abstract. In today's world, islands have been hot spots for global tourists due to their unique natural landscapes and cultural environments. Thus, how to develop the island tourism sustainably becomes a worthy question to explore. So far, few studies discuss the island tourism from the perspective of system science. Based on the theory of dissipative structure, this paper analyzes the evolution and its dynamic mechanism of Chuanshan Archipelago tourism system with dividing the process into four stages. It finds that the evolutionary impetus comes from the nonlinear action and the coupling relationship among various elements of the self-organization and heter-organization in tourism system. During the course of evolution, the tourism system constantly fluctuates. Therefore, in order to avoid a path of decline, the nonlinear operating mechanism should be improved to constantly obtain a negative entropy and promote an order development of tourism system.