The State Council has approved the 'Tourism Powerhouse 15th Five-Year Plan' and the 'Expanding Consumption 15th Five-Year Plan', deploying a series of new initiatives for tourism consumption. The plans propose leveraging agricultural cultural heritage, natural scenery, and folk festivals to integrate agricultural production, agro-processing, and cultural tourism experiences, expanding farm-based experiences, forest wellness, leisure camping, and guiding localities with conditions to develop long-stay tourism. At the same time, they call for tapping natural, cultural, and traditional Chinese medicine resources to create hot spring, forest, climate, and TCM-based wellness products, and promoting a selection of premium rural leisure tourism routes.
Industrial heritage will be given new functions. The plans require intensifying the exploration and interpretation of industrial history, craftsmanship, and well-known brands, promoting industrial culture, and facilitating the functional transformation and business format upgrading of old factory areas, plants, and facilities. Encouragement is given to qualified industrial enterprises to showcase manufacturing achievements in aerospace, shipbuilding, automobiles, and other sectors, creating distinctive industrial tourism products and routes, and supporting old industrial cities and resource-based cities in advancing industrial heritage protection and utilization.
The integration of sports events and tourism is also specified in the plans. The documents propose enriching professional sports events and mass sports activities, developing participant and spectator travel, launching distinctive routes and themed products, promoting events in scenic spots and resorts, and actively developing the outdoor sports industry with the construction of high-quality outdoor sports destinations.
Self-driving tours and unique transportation experiences become new highlights. The plans require creating boutique self-driving tourism highways and themed post offices according to local conditions, encouraging highway service areas to build new consumption scenes, developing distinctive tourism trains and dedicated routes, and supporting eligible scenic spots in safely conducting low-altitude tourism activities.
In ice and snow tourism, the plans encourage social forces to renovate existing resources to build snow and ice venues close to communities, support places like Chongli in Hebei, Beidahu in Jilin, Yabuli in Heilongjiang, and Altay in Xinjiang to become ice and snow tourism resorts, and promote the expansion from single-season to four-season operation. Support is given to bidding for and hosting international ice and snow events, developing ice and snow-themed performances, launching ice and snow experience scenes, holding rime festivals, ice and snow worlds, and garden parties, continuously issuing national ice and snow consumption promotion measures, and organizing ice and snow consumption seasons.
Urban leisure and marine tourism also received new plans. The plans propose launching products like city walks, travel photography, music festivals, and digital experiences, guiding tourist attractions to collaborate with performing arts, animation, gaming, and film companies to create offline consumption scenes, expanding specialized night tours, cultural and creative markets, and new performance spaces, and encouraging first launches, first shows, etc. For marine tourism, they will build distinctive marine cultural tourism destinations, construct a marine tourism belt linking north and south, improve tourism and leisure functions in various regions, and enhance tourism levels at islands such as Liugong Island, Liandao, Zhoushan Islands, Meizhou Island, Gulangyu, Hailing Island, Weizhou Island, Fenjiezhou Island, and Wuzhizhou Island. Develop cruise and yacht tourism, promote the construction of cruise ports and public yacht marinas, optimize cruise routes, steadily expand yacht consumption pilots, support the construction of the Shanghai Cruise Tourism Development Demonstration Zone, advance cruise port construction in multiple coastal cities, and promote the high-quality development of night cruise ships.
Study tours are also brought into the scope of standardized improvement. The plans require establishing a sound standards system, strengthening regulatory management, guiding localities to enhance departmental coordination, regulating the behavior of study tour operators and practitioners, promoting distinctive and differentiated development of study tours, cultivating high-quality courses, routes, and products, and creating influential study tour brands.