Themed as "trips to the countryside", China's tourism industry has started its annual celebration ceremony in Xibaipo of Hebei province.

The tourism slogan of this year is "new countryside, new tourism, new experience and new fashion", in order to give full play to the countryside role in tourism development, said Shao Qiwei, director of China National Tourism Administration.

China began to look for the channel of combining city leisure life and the low season of the countryside in order to construct a new countryside in China, said Ding Xuelin, a Ph.D of consumption research.

He said the lack of construction in the countryside has prohibited villagers from tourism benefits.

For example, a road from Beijing to Xibaipo has neither a direct railway nor highway between the two places, with the distance of 350 kilometers. Normally passengers will take a train to Shijiazhuang, and then bus to Xibaipo.

Hotel facilities are also inadequate.

Wei Xiao'an, an expert of the Tourism Research Center of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences divided the development trend into three phases. The first is agricultural tourism, involving fruit-picking and fishing, which are already popular in China. The second is trips to the countryside in order to reconstruct China's rural economy. The third is farmers' trips, which will enable villagers to see other areas.

Source: Xinhua