In the first half of December 2018, the "2018 Tourism Group Development Forum" was held in Beijing. The theme of this forum was "Social Responsibility: Roles and Actions in the Era of Cultural and Tourism Integration," with nearly 500 representatives from tourism groups, tourism enterprises, research institutions, and cultural and tourism systems across the country participating. Luo Shugang, Minister of Culture and Tourism, attended the forum and delivered a keynote speech. Kong Rong, Deputy Director of the Art Development Center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and representing an affiliate of the ministry, attended the event and gave a speech titled "Exploring Innovative Models for the Integrated Development of Culture and Tourism." Kong Rong stated that under the backdrop of cultural and tourism integration, efforts will focus on using integrated cultural and tourism projects as carriers, standards for building characteristic towns as leverage, and the cultivation of brands and market entities as the driving force to promote the integration of culture and tourism as a new engine for economic transformation and upgrading.
Kong Rong emphasized that the establishment of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism following the institutional reform of the State Council marks the elevation of cultural and tourism integration to a new strategic level of thinking, translating into new national-level deployments. It is the responsibility and duty of professionals within the cultural and tourism system to earnestly fulfill the new functions of the Ministry, vigorously explore theoretical research and industrial practices in the integration of culture and tourism.
It is reported that the Art Development Center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, as an affiliate of the ministry, began deploying work related to the integrated development of culture and tourism starting in 2017. Through ministry-level financial approval, the "China Culture and Tourism Construction Project" was launched and officially implemented in 2018. The series of initiatives under the China Culture and Tourism Construction Project include: the "China Culture and Tourism" High-Level Forum, the China International Cultural and Art Expo, the China Cultural Tourism Series Blue Book, a series of cultural tourism research publications, talent training programs, incubation and cultivation of pilot demonstration projects for cultural and tourism integration, the construction of cross-industry expert talent think tanks, the development of public service platforms and promotional efforts, research on characteristic towns themed around culture and tourism, creation guidelines, and the development of evaluation standards.
Kong Rong pointed out in her speech that the new trends in the integrated development of culture and tourism in the new era are reflected in three aspects:
The acceleration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, technological change, and economic globalization in the information age has made the restructuring of boundaries a major trend in global development. The behavior of Chinese enterprises competing for high-end positions in the global value chain will become the norm. The creation of new value chains signifies the arrival of a new era of business models, which will continuously give rise to new industry formats. Against the backdrop of the national new economic strategy, the weakening of traditional momentum requires enhancement and transformation, urgently calling for the emergence of new momentum. The combination of old and new momentum forms a hybrid drive, thus elevating the integrated development of culture and tourism to the height of national strategic thinking.
The second important trend is that the development of world civilization means that a country’s image and strength are no longer reflected solely in politics, economy, and diplomacy, but increasingly presented and exported through cultural soft power. This includes constructing a nation and its people's discourse system and lasting influence on the world stage through spiritual guidance, values, and humanistic experiences, making culture an increasingly powerful force leading nations globally. President Xi Jinping has elaborated on this: "Culture is the foundation for the Chinese nation to stand among the nations of the world, the internal driving force and spiritual support for national progress and development, and the essence of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." Therefore, the establishment of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism is a strategic national deployment grounded in both domestic and international contexts, with a view to both the present and the long-term future.
The third trend is the transformation of the domestic market economy towards a capital economy, product economy towards community economy, scale economy towards sharing economy, and sectoral economy towards cross-sector economy. Under the new circumstances, how to implement the cultural industry as a pillar of the national economy, enhance the quality and effectiveness of cultural industry development, transform cultural and tourism resources into industrial and market advantages, and adapt the outstanding cultural genes of the Chinese nation to contemporary cultural development and modern society—achieving creative transformation and innovative development of culture—is the new challenge of the new era. From the perspective of "culture +" cross-sector and cross-industry integration, the new trends in the integrated development of culture and tourism are mainly reflected in the following five aspects:
New Business Formats. The first two technological revolutions primarily aimed at improving the efficiency of material production, while the third technological revolution shifted more toward improving the efficiency of non-material production. Its core is to achieve a high degree of integration between spiritual and material production, strengthening the deep integration of technological innovation and cultural creativity. This kind of innovation is mainly manifested when market entities adopt new business methods, technologies, and tools to operate traditional or emerging formats, thereby creating new forms of cultural tourism industries with novel product combinations to meet diverse market consumption demands. The application of new technologies is particularly prominent in the digital cultural industry.
Cross-Sector Aggregation. This is an essential process in the innovative integration of culture and tourism. On the basis of industrial integration, the cultural and tourism industries continue to cross over into other sectors, while cultural elements and tourism elements continuously aggregate to transform and upgrade existing industries. First is cross-sector integration—horizontal consolidation of multiple enterprises in certain links of the cultural tourism and related industrial chains, and vertical forward integration through mergers and reorganizations of upstream, midstream, and downstream industries. Second is the aggregation of elements, primarily referring to the innovative aggregation of creativity, capital, markets, talent, brand, information, and channels within the industry. However, these elements do not simply merge directly but require cross-sector industrial integration to achieve aggregation.
Content Activation. Expressing cultural connotations through tourism is the essence of content activation. One aspect of this fusion is the static activation of cultural content, demonstrated through the presentation of physical carriers such as architecture, landscapes, and tourism souvenirs. The other is the dynamic activation of cultural content, shown in interactive experiences like artistic ambiance and cultural events, bringing cultural content to life and making it more vibrant, energetic, and impactful by altering its external form.
Product Design Driven by Cultural Creativity refers to focusing on the extraction of core cultural elements under the impetus of cultural creativity, combining artistic aesthetics, emotional value, and practical functionality. This results in products that are humanistic, aesthetically pleasing, and lifestyle-oriented—the essence being cultural tourism products. The cultural creativity industry plays a role in the vertical transformation and upgrading of the cultural industry itself and also enhances the production and sales of traditional industries in horizontal integration, offering significant potential for increasing product value, strengthening consumer-product relationships, and building brand loyalty.
Strong IP-Driven. The core of a strong IP lies in being interesting, substantive, story-rich, meaningful, imaginative, and presenting humanity in ways that are surprising yet reasonable. The cultural tourism industry has unique advantages in IP incubation and cultivation, exploring areas such as market branding and derivative product development. The domestic IP licensing economy is still in its early experimental stages, and future collaboration with authorized economic industry organizations can further explore production factors, industrial chain construction, and business models.
In the process of integrating culture and tourism, three key areas need focused attention:
First, integrating cultural genes to unify value interests, emotions, and traditions as the core driving force for social stability, coexistence, and innovative development. By constructing public products, services, and comprehensive social innovation governance systems, simultaneous development of material and spiritual civilization can be promoted.
Second, through the recreation of cultural value, enhancing the soft power of innovative economies. China is a country rich in both cultural and tourism resources, but serious issues exist in industrial development, such as incomplete industrial chains and low-end industrial value chains. The integrated development of culture and tourism requires in-depth exploration of cultural resources, organic integration of cultural and natural resources, creative design and derivative development of cultural elements, building cultural tourism brands, marketing and promotion, segmentation and deep targeting of markets and consumer groups, technological application, and investment and financing—exploring an integrated innovation model combining government, academia, research, industry, and application.
Third, establishing collaborative innovation mechanisms to explore innovative behaviors in the integrated development of culture and tourism. Combining the technological logic models of culture and the new economy to innovate cultural brokerage industries and explore cross-sector integration can link primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, forming a new large-scale industrial ecosystem. Deep integration of culture and tourism requires breaking down industry silos and organizational boundaries in the cultivation of new formats, incubation of new industries, and creation of new models. Efficient aggregation of production factors, organic allocation of industrial resources, and advantages in market product development and scale must be achieved. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on key areas and major issues in cultural and tourism integration innovation, with multiple stakeholders and elements collaborating, complementing, and efficiently coordinating to carry out innovative behaviors under a collaborative innovation model.
Kong Rong stated that several key tasks were completed last year: First, using the Ministry of Culture’s research topics as a starting point, focusing on characteristic towns as spatial carriers for cultural and tourism integration, and exploring new paths for integrated development. Second, hosting the first China Cultural Tourism High-Level Forum at the Forbidden City, building a platform for academic research and industrial practice exchange in cultural and tourism integration. Third, designing the "IP TOWN" model, selecting pilot units, and adopting a central-local co-construction approach for initial trials. Fourth, securing financial approval from the former Ministry of Culture for the "China Culture and Tourism Construction Project," which officially launched in 2018 and expanded its scope of work annually based on actual conditions.
Building on previous work, Kong Rong proposed that in the practice of cultural and tourism integration, it is important to respect original ecological culture, protect local ecological architecture and folk customs, and inherit indigenous culture; to regenerate old villages by transforming them in line with local cultural concepts and revitalizing the architectural landscape of towns, giving new life to abandoned villages; to create a rich variety of formats through in-depth exploration, sorting, and refinement of cultural resources, using creative regeneration design; to develop highly recognizable brand images and spokespersons by uncovering and developing local cultural IPs; to achieve commercial monetization through scenario planning and creation in multi-dimensional ways such as experience economy, fan economy, licensing economy, and exhibition economy; to build an operational development model combining real scenes and fiction, using cultural IPs as the core and leader, and through content development, fan accumulation, scene-based traffic entry points, multimedia communication and operations, and a series of extended developments, realizing a new four-in-one development model of "culture + tourism + industry + spatial carrier."