The Ministry of Culture and Tourism recently announced at its fourth-quarter press conference that 560,000 cultural enterprises in China generated 6218.7 billion yuan (USD 890 billion) culture and tourism revenues in the first three quarters, 7.6% more than last year.
In the first nine months of this year, about 4.597 billion domestic trips were made by Chinese travelers, up 8.8% year-on-year. Visitor arrivals to China increased by 4.7% to 108.76 million and outbound trips from China rose 8.5% to 119.9 million.
Official data also show that bonds issued by the National Development and Reform Commission for culture and tourism enterprises in 2019 had a total value of 77.7 billion yuan (USD 11 billion), more than five times higher than last year.
During the year, China invested a total of 17.7 billion yuan (USD 2.5 billion) in 85 international culture and tourism collaborations under the Belt and Road initiative. The projects, in the areas of digital culture, tourism performing art, cultural and tourism facilities, were scattered across 20 countries and regions.
In terms of public facilities for cultural tourism, 22,300 new toilets at tourism attractions have been constructed so far this year－17% more than this year’s target. The country has completed 89% of the targets of the current three-year action plan, having built a total of 52,600 tourism toilets nationwide in the past two years. About 98,000 or 82% of all toilets at tourist sites are mapped on Baidu Map. (Translated by Elena)
