“Red tourism” is expected to receive a further boost and become a featured tourism category during the upcoming May Day holidays as China celebrates the centenary of the Communist Party of China.
Among the popular venues are the sites of the First CPC National Congress in Shanghai and Zhejiang Province, the Jinggangshan Revolutionary Base in East China’ Jiangxi Province and the Zunyi Conference memorial hall in southwest China’s Guizhou Province.
A staff with the Zunyi Conference memorial hall told the Global Times that they are ready to receive a large audience during May Day holiday as people’s desire to learn and experience revolutionary history and culture has become stronger in recent times.
“Now we receive 200 teams every day, nearly double the number from 2019,” Nie Cai, a guide of the memorial hall told the Global Times on Saturday.
She expected the number of tourists to further increase in May and June ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China in July.
“We are expanding the main entrance to hold more visitors,” she said.
According to cpcnews.cn, the official news website of the Party, it was at the Zunyi Conference, which took place in January 1935 in Zunyi, that Mao Zedong established his leadership of the Party and of the Red Army.
Guizhou has now formed a red tourism route and the number of tourists coming to Guizhou to participate in red tourism is increasing year by year, Cai said.
The visitors include young people, some of who come to learn about the history of the Party, as well as veterans who come to commemorate their revolutionary age, she added.
A staff member from the South Lake Revolutionary Memorial Boat, in Jiaxing, East China’s Zhejiang Province, also confirmed with the Global Times that “the number of tourists has increased a lot compared to the same period last year.”
“As the Party prepares to celebrate the100th anniversary of its founding in July, it is expected that the number of tourists will increase a lot in the coming months,” a staff from Nanchang August 1 Memorial Hall told the Global Times on Saturday.
With this enthusiasm, Southwest China’s Sichuan has launched 11 travel routes covering 40 scenic sites, under the theme of “Revisiting the Long March Road” and East China’s Jiangsu has launched 12 red tourism routes.
Xu Xiaolei, marketing manager at China’s CYTS Tours Holding Co, told the Global Times on Saturday that red tourism would become a relatively prominent growth point in the first half of this year.
According to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, from 2004 to 2019, the number of red tourism trips made each year increased from 140 million to 1.41 billion.
Tourists crowd a red tourism attraction in Shanghang County, Southeast China’s Fujian Province, on February 10. Photo: VCG
