From the lively food stalls in Taizhou city in east China’s Jiangsu Province, where throngs of tourists gather, to the bustling Qianmen Street in Beijing where people queue up for tea-flavored ice cream in the hot summer, nighttime tourism is booming across China.
With a market scale valued at over 50 trillion yuan (about 7 trillion U.S. dollars), the nighttime economy aligns with the nation’s efforts to boost consumer spending on services. In the first half of 2024 (H1), surveyed online travel and catering services consumption grew 59.9 percent and 21.7 percent year on year, respectively.
Last week, the State Council announced 20 specific measures to boost service consumption by tapping into consumer spending potential in sectors such as culture and entertainment, sports, tourism, education and training, health, and green products. The latest measures have been put in place on the heels of a highest-level policy meeting of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in mid-July.
The third plenary session of the 20th CPC Central Committee adopted wide-ranging reform tasks to be completed in the next five years, aiming to promote high-quality economic growth that will become more balanced, innovation-driven, integrated, and open.
The plenum’s resolution said the country would pursue high-quality development, which was deemed the “primary task” in building China into a modern socialist country in all respects. A to-do list in this regard encompasses work such as fostering new quality productive forces and enhancing the resilience and security of industrial and supply chains.