National Games boost tourism in Greater Bay Area in south China

As the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area city cluster in south China has seen a surge in tourism during the ongoing 15th National Games, Guangzhou — the provincial capital city of the co-host province of Guangdong — has initiated a series of characteristic activities and promotional offers, fueling a cultural and tourism wave of “traveling with the Games.”

Jointly hosted by Guangdong Province and the neighboring Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions from Nov 9 to 21, this year’s Games has pioneered to hold competitions in the three regions across the border.

Throughout the Games, many attractions in Guangzhou are offering free admission to registered athletes, coaches and referees with valid IDs and staff cards, while spectators at competition venues could enjoy ticket discounts with their IDs and event passes.

“With our IDs and staff cards, we can enter for free. And since our kid loves it, so we’ve taken him to Chimelong,” said Ma Jun, a National Games staff member. During his off time, Ma and his family members came to Guangzhou to travel together.

“I want to see the koalas, but I have not seen them yet,” said his son Ma Zichen.

During the Games so far, theme parks and scenic areas in Guangzhou have introduced all kinds of featured activities. The city has also released nearly one million free and discounted tickets, driving a travel trend combining sports with culture and tourism.

“Discounted tickets promote the attractions and encourage people to explore and learn more,” said a tourist.

To meet the travel demand during the Games, travel agencies have launched “Travel with the Games” packages featuring Greater Bay Area landmarks, cultural experiences and local cuisine.

“We’ve added intangible cultural heritage dim sum cuisines onto the menu. Visitors can also enjoy Cantonese opera and local dishes during Pearl River night cruises. Martial arts culture and Cantonese cuisine culture experiencing programs have been incorporated into spectator travel packages. The farthest booking was from Xinjiang [more than 4,000 kilometers away]. A customer there purchased a package to Macao to watch a table tennis match,” said Guan Jian, brand manager of the official travel agency ticketing operator.

The Games has delivered strong momentum to cultural and tourism spending in the host regions. Data show that during the event, air ticket bookings to Guangdong’s Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai Cities rose 26 percent year on year.

The majority of the world will continue to remain dedicated to building a new multilateral system, despite the United States’s decision to withdraw from multilateral institutions and conduct trade on a bilateral basis, said Nobel laureate Michael Spence.

Speaking at an exclusive interview with China Media Group (CMG), Spence, a professor at New York University and co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, said that most countries continue to oppose the unilateral approach adopted by U.S. leadership. “We lived in a world that had a multilateral system that institutions and rules worked pretty well. The United States is not, under this administration, the Trump Administration, is not interested in those. They don’t view multilateral structures as helpful. They view them as a place where the United States gets taken advantage of. So they are withdrawing from multilateral institutions, the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organization,” Spence said.

The economist stressed that the world needs to establish a new multilateral system that can coexist with the transactional, nationalist system pursued by the United States.

“But the multilateral system is important. So I think the more important longer-run question is, are we going to have a multilateral system, who are going to be its principal sponsors, and what’s it going to look like? I think by now it’s pretty apparent to people that whatever that system looks like, it won’t look like the old system, that international policy making won’t allow these outcomes to be determined purely by market considerations, return on investment, comparative advantage, that kind of thing. That’s the world we lived in. There’s, I would say, zero chance we’re going back to that world,” said the Nobel Laureate.

“I don’t think the rest of the world is going to start adopt the American bilateral negotiated agreement approach to trade. And so at some level, there’s going to be continuing trade in the 75 percent of the world economy that’s not the United States. And so that constructing, I think, in the best scenario, a multilateral system that’s more complex, more fragmented kind of side by side and in parallel with an American approach to trade that’s more transactional and nationalistic and certainly kind of bilateral in structure. That’s an element of the complexity by the way. I mean having those two things going along side by side is probably not all that easy to accomplish, but that that seems to be where we’re going,” Spence said.