It is an important direction for green and low-carbon development to study carbon equilibrium of the tourism industry in the new era. Based on the perspective of "source-sink", tourism carbon equilibrium status and regional differences were studied by tourism carbon deficit measurement model and Theil index in China from 2008 to 2017. The relationship between the provincial carbon equilibrium distribution and the influencing factors was explored by the K-means cluster and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA). The results showed that:(1) The carbon emission of China's tourism industry was much higher than the carbon capacity of the ecosystem during 2008 to 2017, resulting in the average carbon deficit of tourism rising from 5.15 million tons to 13.58 million tons, and tourism industry has always been in a carbon imbalance. (2) The regional differences were presented by the results of Theil index in tourism carbon deficit, which were mainly due to intra-regional differences, while intra-regional differences were mainly caused by differences in the eastern and western regions. (3) Based on the differences of evaluation indices, various provinces could be divided into four types:the least type of tourism emissions, the most type of tourism carbon capacity, the more type of tourism carbon deficit, and the most type of tourism carbon deficit. Degree of tourism carbon imbalance was relatively weaker in the first two groups, in which most of the provinces were in a general state of carbon imbalance. While the latter two groups generally showed a serious carbon imbalance, and the situation of emission reduction of provincial tourism was not optimistic in these groups. (4) From the lower left corner to the upper right corner of the canonical correspondence analysis figure, four groups were transited gradually from a general carbon imbalance type area to a severe carbon imbalance type area. (5) The principal factors affecting the change of tourism carbon equilibrium could be identified by the canonical correspondence analysis method, such as tourism reception scale, tourism economic scale, tourism technology level, land use structure, and so on. Based on the heterogeneous spatial effect of various factors on the carbon equilibrium of tourism, the low-carbon development path of regional differentiation is pointed out.