Local officials say visitors have changed approach to spending their leisure time
The Jinhai Lake International Convention and Exhibition Center serves as the main venue of this year's Beijing Pinggu World Leisure Congress earlier this month. (REN CHAO / XINHUA)
The recent 16th World Leisure Congress is of great significance to upgrading Beijing's cultural and tourism businesses, local officials said.
"Along with China's rapid economic development and an increasing number of paid vacations, people have had a new understanding of tourism, shifting from traditional sightseeing to focusing more on leisure," said Pang Wei, an organizing committee member and deputy director of the Beijing Bureau of Culture and Tourism.
The congress served as a channel for promoting exchanges and communication between scholars of leisure tourism in Beijing and their foreign counterparts
Pang Wei, deputy director of the Beijing Bureau of Culture and Tourism
"The congress served as a channel for promoting exchanges and communication between scholars of leisure tourism in Beijing and their foreign counterparts. It also provided more theoretical support and practical cases to the city's tourism industrial transformation and upgrading."
The congress could also accelerate the internationalization of cultural tourism in Beijing and boost the development of region-wide tourism, Pang added.
The 16th World Leisure Congress was scheduled for October 2020 but was postponed to this month due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was held on April 15-21 in Beijing's Pinggu district.
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Organizers designed a series of themed activities to promote leisure awareness, including a main forum with the slogan "leisure improves the quality of life" as well as 14 parallel forums, an expo and an award ceremony.
The main forum was held on April 16, the same day of the opening ceremony. A group of experts and scholars in the field delivered keynote speeches, including Cristina Ortega, chief operating officer of the World Leisure Organization, and a professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
The 14 parallel forums focused on such topics as leisure cities and urbanization, leisure and innovation, leisure education and culture, leisure tourism and reception, and leisure and agriculture.
A visitor looks at a recreational vehicle displayed during the congress. (REN CHAO / XINHUA)
The Jinhai Lake International Convention and Exhibition Center served as the main venue for the event. The outdoor exhibition zone was located near the district's Jinhai Lake, covering a total area of 319,000 square meters.
Using its mature intelligent cloud platform, which combined multiple services including business matchmaking and online business talks while facilitating trade promotion, the weeklong event was also held online this year to enable foreigners to participate.
During the congress, reports on leisure city development and Beijing's leisure industry and culture were issued.
The first award ceremony of international leisure lifestyle cases was also held to showcase diverse ways of leisurely living.
The China International Leisure Industry Exposition, held on April 16-19, served as an important part of the congress. The offline expo covered an area of 9,600 sq m and comprised four leisure-themed exhibition zones covering tourism, culture, sports and agriculture. Three functional zones were also set up for a display of world leisure industries, leisure life experiences and the promotion of investment, trade and business negotiations.
More than 200 companies and government agencies have taken part in the exhibition, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Miniso, Club Med and the tourism bureaus of Thailand and Switzerland.
Wearing a virtual reality glasses, a visitor enjoys a skiing experience. (REN CHAO / XINHUA)
The expo also has an online version, which provides services like business negotiations, booking and live broadcasting.
To better showcase China's traditional leisure culture, the congress organized nine activities including a mental game competition, a folk culture performance, a peach culture forum, a calligraphy activity and a tai chi performance.
Pinggu is Beijing's easternmost district, endowed with mountains, rivers and forests. According to local governmental officials, its forest coverage rate has reached 67.3 percent.
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The district was the first in Beijing to win the title of National Forest City and is also on the list of national ecological environment demonstration zones.
Pinggu has nearly 15,000 hectares of peach trees, which attracts millions of tourists every year to enjoy the annual flower blossom. It also boasts five national 4A tourist attractions, the second-highest level for a tourist attraction in China, and 13 tourist spots with distinctive characteristics.
In addition to its beautiful natural scenery, Pinggu has profound historical and cultural resources. It has a 1,000-year history of Taoist culture and a 600-year history of culture related to the Great Wall.
