More than 20 tourist institutions from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Japan, North Korea, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan gathered at the ongoing Taihu tourist festival held on Sunday in Wuxi City, east China's Jiangsu province.

The festival was filled with jollification as institutions presented their best products, coupled with local people's eager participation.

Tourist building models decorated large pictures of coconut trees, blue sand beaches and wide deserts. Young women, dressed in ethnic style clothes, issued pamphlets and souvenirs to the public.

The Yangtze River delta region tourist summit was held in the afternoon when vice director of China National Tourism Administration Gu Zhaoxi delivered a speech.

According to Gu, foreign exchange earnings made from tourist industry had seen a big jump since the Reform and Opening up policy.

With more and more countries and regions being to Chinese tourists’ destinations, outbound tourists increase greatly every year.

This year, the number of foreign currency used is more than that earned. In 2002, outbound tourists in China increased 36.8 percent while the relative growth in the world was 2.7 percent for the same year.

In 2003, outbound tourists in China reached 20.22 million despite the SARS outbreak. Such figure was 28.85 million in 2004. In 2002, Chinese outbound tourist spending was 15.4 billion US dollars, ranking seventh in the world and accounting 3.2 percent of the world’s total tourist expenditure.

Japan's Oita village caught a lot of public attentions at the festival. According to the official from Oita's tourist administration, tourism acted an important role in the country's economic development.

The prosperous Yangtze River delta region was an ideal place to cooperate with Japan in the tourist sector.

In April 2004, the Oita village signed cooperation agreements with Jiangyin and Yixing in Wuxi city. The agreements aim to promote a win-win situation for both China and Japan by sharing the tourist resources.

The Dongfang Holiday Company from Hong Kong promoted tourist products focused on Taiwan island.

General manager of the company Feng Zhuoxiong said they were confident in exploiting markets in the mainland, especially in the Yangtze River delta region.

He said Taiwan's political background and its exotic folk culture were the biggest tourist attractions. He predicted that mainland tourists to Taiwan would be far more than the current figure of 3,000 people every year, after direct flight was realized between the two places.

Tourist analyst Wei Xiao'an said China was a big tourist nation. The high growth rate of outbound Chinese tourists in recently years had prompted tourist institutions to eye the mainland market. This was beneficial to the development in the tourist sector and the overall economic structure in China. China need to done more and strengthened regional cooperation to build itself into a strong nation in the tourist sector.

(Chinanews.cn September 6, 2005)