Jixi, China’s “graphite capital,” headlines Heilongjiang’s push for cross-border and summer tourism growth
A culture and tourism promotion conference opened in Jixi City, in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, on July 8, forming part of the 8th Heilongjiang Provincial Tourism Industry Development Conference.
The event drew on Sushen Culture, one of the region’s earliest fishing and hunting civilisations, alongside border landscapes, red cultural heritage and industrial and mining heritage, staging a performance intended to showcase the province’s cultural and tourism assets to visiting industry figures.
Xu Peng, vice chairman of the World Tourism Alliance, told attendees that China is pushing cross-border tourism development with unprecedented effort as both a major destination and source market. He said Heilongjiang has been accelerating construction of a world-class ice-and-snow destination and summer retreat offering, aimed at turning its cold-climate assets into a thriving economy.
Jixi, positioning itself around its identity as an ecological tourism city and graphite producer, used its turn as host to build an all-round tourism map, upgrade the visitor experience with digital tools and widen its source markets through more open, consumer-friendly measures.
The wider conference programme included a provincial industry promotion event, a national travel agency promotion conference, signing ceremonies for tourism investment projects and field visits across the province’s cultural and tourism sites, bringing together operators and officials to discuss upgrading pathways and share transformation models.
Heilongjiang has also rolled out a 100-day summer tourism campaign built around ten themed travel routes, drawing on its forests, wetlands and border rivers to widen its province-wide tourism offer.
Why it matters for the trade
The Jixi event signals Heilongjiang’s intent to convert a well-established winter tourism identity into a year-round proposition, with summer routes and cross-border traffic positioned as the next growth lever. For inbound operators and DMCs working China’s northeast, the province’s emphasis on cross-border development and looser, more consumer-friendly market access measures points to an opening for partnerships built around border tourism and multi-season itineraries, rather than reliance on the ice-and-snow season alone. The scale of investment signing ceremonies alongside the promotion conference also suggests Heilongjiang is courting outside capital into its tourism infrastructure, an avenue worth monitoring for operators seeking joint venture or investment entry points into a market still under-served relative to its resource base.