Turning tourism into a cultural industry

With Dragon Boat Festival round the corner, it's time to think about how to enrich tourism with traditional culture.

As part of the Party and State institutional reform, a key move in the year marking the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up, the former Ministry of Culture and China National Tourism Administration were merged into one. The merger of the two departments under the State Council, China's Cabinet, is important for three reasons.

The merger of the two departments will boost Chinese people's confidence in their own culture and improve China's soft power. It will also help solve the long-term problem of overlapping duties and unclear functions of and the lack of coordination among departments at the local level.