The train entered the Xishuangbanna Station of the China-Laos Railway, and passengers from all over the world couldn't wait to walk out of the station, and the coconut breeze and banana shadow, the heat wave, and the fresh and beautiful southern Yunnan style came into view. On the square in front of the station, taxis, buses, and ride-hailing cars are busy and orderly, full of tourists rushing to the next station...
Since the Spring Festival this year, the popularity of Xishuangbanna tourism has continued unabated. This southernmost city in Yunnan Province is known for its tropical rainforest scenery, rich biodiversity and strong ethnic minority atmosphere. The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized the implementation of urban renewal actions, strengthening urban infrastructure construction, and building livable, resilient and smart cities. Xishuangbanna Prefecture proposed to rely on tropical rainforests and take health and wellness travel as the feature, accelerate quality and efficiency, innovate and develop, open cooperation, and strive to build Xishuangbanna into an international health tourism destination suitable for living, traveling, health care and work, and a healthy life destination that everyone yearns for.
Ecological greening
In March, the reporter walked on the streets of Jinghong City, Xishuangbanna Prefecture, lined with street trees ranging from low shrubs to tall coconut trees, iron wood, and king palm.
Sun Hao, deputy director of the Publicity Department of the Xishuangbanna Prefecture Party Committee, said, "The rainforest is the symbol of Xishuangbanna, and the urban green belt can highlight the ecological characteristics of Xishuangbanna by creating a vegetation structure that mimics tropical rainforest by refinement, making the city more green and vibrant."
The territory of Jinghong, Mengla and Menghai in Xishuangbanna Prefecture preserves the only intact and continuous large area of tropical forest on the northern edge of the world. In order to give full play to the greatest advantages of ecological resource enrichment, Xishuangbanna continues to promote the "five major actions" of rainforest protection, rainforest restoration, rainforest return, forest-city integration, and environmental governance, and makes every effort to build a pilot demonstration of the construction of national main functional areas and an international biodiversity conservation demonstration area.
Located in the center of Jinghong, Peacock Lake covers an area of about 2,8 square meters, and at the beginning of construction, the ground cover and mesopelagic shrubs were not rich enough, and the biodiversity was insufficient. Liao Rongke, landscaping engineer of Jinghong City Administration, said: "After the construction of Green Beautiful City was launched last year, on the basis of retaining the original large trees, 54 varieties of native plants were added, and more than 150 species of plants in the park were added. ”
"Ecological statehood" is the concept that Xishuangbanna people have long adhered to. In recent years, Xishuangbanna has severely rectified the deforestation of tea planting, implemented tropical rainforest and ecological protection and restoration projects, and successfully established itself as the first batch of national ecological civilization construction demonstration prefectures in China and the first in Yunnan. The forest coverage rate of the whole state increased from 2012.78% in 3 to 81.34%, ranking first in Yunnan Province, and 9 third-level nature reserves and 3 protected communities were established, with a total area of 643.4 million mu, and good ecological resources provided habitat for many rare animals and plants.
In the Xishuangbanna Wild Elephant Valley Scenic Area, a large number of tourists come here every day. In 2021, the journey of wild Asian elephants "north to south" spread the story of harmonious coexistence with nature to the world. At present, the number of wild Asian elephants in Xishuangbanna has increased from more than 20 in the 80s of the 170th century to more than 300, and it is strictly protected.
Cultural tourism to improve quality
Early in the morning, in front of the major hotels in Xishuangbanna, tourist buses are ready. In the afternoon, Xishuangbanna Listening Park and Tropical Botanical Garden were full of people, and many tourists who had just arrived in Xishuangbanna were amazed by the tropical rainforest landscape and Dai cultural customs. At the beginning of the lantern, the bustle belonging to the western double scenery of Jiezhuang has just begun. All kinds of stalls and snacks are overwhelmed, young people dressed in Dai costumes rub shoulders one after another, and photographers behind them accurately capture beautiful moments in the crowd...
This year, Xishuangbanna ushered in a successful start to tourism. During the Spring Festival holiday, the state received 271,75,554 tourists, a year-on-year increase of 51.3%. In March, about 10,<> tourists come every day.
Xishuangbanna is one of the earliest ethnic regions in the country to develop tourism, and after years of development, tourism has gradually become a rich industry and a happy cause for the border people. However, Xishuangbanna also has shortcomings such as backward tourism infrastructure, aging product formats and low quality of public services.
At the end of February, the Office of the Leading Group for the Rectification of Tourism Market Order in Xishuangbanna Prefecture announced the first "Red and Black List" of 2, which included a tour guide and travel agency in the black list, gave a warning to the police, and included it in key supervision. On March 2023, Xishuangbanna Prefecture issued opinions on further regulating the order of the tourism market, emphasizing the need to strengthen tourism market supervision, increase exposure, create a safer, more stable and orderly tourism market environment, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of tour operators and tourists.
Yan Wenlong, deputy director of Xishuangbanna Prefecture Culture and Tourism Bureau, introduced that in order to continuously deepen the supply-side structural reform of tourism, in February this year, Xishuangbanna Prefecture issued the "Three-Year Action Plan for the High-quality Development of Seven Key Industries including Cultural Tourism and Health Care (2-2023)". Xishuangbanna Prefecture will promote the integrated development of cultural tourism, commerce, health and agriculture and tea forest in accordance with the idea of "one body and seven transformations", focusing on the implementation of seven aspects of transformation and innovation and development of tourism infrastructure facilities, cultural tourism health care product structure system, cultural tourism health care project construction, business entity cultivation, tourism intelligence, tourism publicity and promotion, and tourism market management, and strive to make up for shortcomings.
At present, a number of Dai medical health care and rural health tourism projects such as Jinghong International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone and Jinghong Dadugang Pu'er Tea One, Two and Three Production Integration Demonstration Project are accelerating construction. "The state-level finance arranges 3000 million yuan of support funds every year to help the development of the cultural tourism and health care industry." Iwawenlong said.
Invest in hot soil
Walking into the Xishuangbanna Health Products Park located in Mengyang Town, Jinghong City, tower cranes are lined up, trucks shuttle, site leveling, plant construction, etc. are in full swing. Li Cong, the relevant person in charge of Xishuangbanna Health Products Park, introduced that the park is located in the center of Xishuangbanna, with superior conditions for multimodal transportation by water, land, air and rail, and will build a modern logistics area in the north with logistics warehousing and cargo distribution, and a production and processing area in the south with rubber, tea and biomedicine as the mainstay.
Xishuangbanna has a unique location. In recent years, Xishuangbanna has seized major opportunities such as the "Belt and Road" construction, comprehensively promoted opening up, and has successively been approved to establish six national-level ports for opening up to the outside world, the Mengla (Mohan) Key Development and Opening Pilot Zone, and the China-Laos Mohan-Boding Economic Cooperation Zone, becoming the only prefecture (city) in Yunnan that also has a national-level port for "water, land, air and rail".
In the small town of Mohan on the border of China and Laos, the heat wave of large-scale development, large-scale opening and large-scale development has rushed in. With the opening of the China-Laos Railway, in May 2022, Kunming City hosted Mohan Town to jointly build an international port city, which is becoming a rapidly changing investment hotspot. Since last year, many of the world's and domestic top 5 enterprises have visited Mohan to investigate and invest, and signed 500 projects. By the end of 21, 2022 new business entities had been added to the Mohan-Boding Economic Cooperation Zone throughout the year, and 635 registered enterprises in the region had reached 915.
"Xishuangbanna has become an important hub and opening frontier for connecting China's southwest and Southeast Asia." Wang Jialing, deputy secretary of the Xishuangbanna Prefecture Party Committee, said that in the future, the concept of "ecological state, industrial prosperity, open and active state, and talent prosperous state" will be firmly established, and the bottleneck of development will be accelerated, the quality of development will be improved, and every effort will be made to build a "demonstration area of prosperity and stability in the border areas of national unity and progress, a green and high-quality development transformation and innovation zone for biodiversity conservation, and a world famous tourist city and modern port city in Yunnan radiating South Asia and Southeast Asia". (Economic Daily reporter Zhou Bin Cao Song)