The Information Office of Shanghai Municipality held a press conference on September 12. Yu Xiufen, director of the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism, briefed the city’s efforts of building itself into an international cultural metropolis and a world-famous tourist destination. Zhu Xiaobo and Zhang Qi, deputy directors of the bureau, also attended the press conference.

In recent years, there has been a growing demand for a better life among the general public in the field of culture and tourism and Shanghai has focused on three main aspects this year:

First: vigorous promotion in the integration of culture and tourism in the new era

In recent years, the bureau has actively promoted the integration of culture and tourism to build the city into an international cultural metropolis and world-famous tourist destination. Major efforts have been made to promote the integration of industries, space, services and exchanges.

Firstly, the city has promoted industrial integration by making innovations and released the driving force of comprehensive industries. Shanghai has boosted the development and opening of relevant resources. Museums, art galleries, theatres and other cultural venues and facilities have been organically integrated into tourism products and routes.

Starting from this year, the city is organizing large-scale activities to invite citizens to enjoy performances and travel around the city for three consecutive years. In the first half of this year, 80 select routes for spring and summer for the second half were released.

The city has endeavored to make architecture more “readable” and make cultural relics "alive." Since last year, Shanghai has joined hands with relevant departments to set up two-dimensional codes for 1,237 immovable cultural relics and excellent historical buildings spanning in six central areas of Huangpu, Jing'an, Xuhui, Changning, Hongkou and Yangpu districts. And visitors can check the history of the building and the stories behind it by scanning the QR code and the move is well received by the public. Up to now, the total number of old buildings for public visit in the six districts has reached 1,032, 10 times that of last year. Next, the city will strive to open more historic buildings to the general public.

Secondly, Shanghai has kept promoting spending on nighttime culture and tourism. This year, nine departments in Shanghai jointly issued the “Guidance and Opinions on Developing Shanghai's Night Economy.” Measures like building a number of landmark nightlife areas, introducing and cultivating night cultural and artistic projects such as immersive theater, musical, opera and so on and developing night trips over the Huangpu River and museums are outlined.

Last month, the city released the first batch of night cultural tourism products — Shanghai Pass, which attracted more than 100 cultural tourism enterprises.

In addition, some museums in the city began to explore the long-term mechanism of night opening from this July. The first batch of 14 museums extended their opening time every Friday.

Thirdly, Shanghai has focused on enhancing the cultural connotation of tourism. It made efforts to upgrade the tour quality on the Huangpu River by strengthening water-shore linkage and launching new tour routes such as "fast-line tour." Among the 79 "Good Places for Leisure in Shanghai, " which covers 16 districts, the city has made continuous efforts to enrich their cultural connotation to fully meet the diversified needs of local residents and tourists.

Shanghai sticks to better functions through integrated space to stimulate vitality of the city. It has three focuses: one is to focus on key areas. Targeting at becoming “people’s top choice for leisure,” Shanghai has pushed forward improvement of functions, businesses models and services at the Shanghai International Tourism Resort, and hosted cultural/entertainment events including the Shanghai Lavender Festival there. For the next phase, the city will try to hold more such high-quality, serialized, branded and featured events to expand its regional influence. Another is to focus on the cultivation of new spaces. Shanghai has launched a batch of new spaces in the first half such as K11 and introduced many fine routes for culture and tourism. It plans to launch another batch of such spaces in the rest of year in line with the requirement of integrating business, tourism and culture to create a group of areas with rich contents and leading fashion. The last is to focus on the improvement of rural tourism. The key is to raise the quality of countryside B&Bs. Shanghai now has nearly 60 registered B&Bs, and it will guide them to improve in services and standardized operation in the next step.

The city sticks to shared development and consumption with integrated services to raise people’s satisfaction. Based on the requirement of refinement, convenience and internationalization, Shanghai will build up a public service system called “123” to convey the city image and its charm. The“1”is the city’s “guest hall for culture and tourism. ” With the core of Shanghai’s 60 tourism service centers and 220 community-based cultural centers, and supplemented by cultural sites and tourism spots, Shanghai will further enrich functions, improve services and enhance maintenance to make Shanghai a window of culture and tourism. Meanwhile, Shanghai has launched the third-generation of business areas for art, realizing airports and metro stations with art exhibitions, and launching the “First Impression of Shanghai” project in airports, high-speed railway stations and cruise ports. The “2”is the city’s community volunteers and guides. Shanghai has enhanced their training to improve the services, making community volunteers “city guides” and guides “excellent communicators of culture”. The “3” is the three platforms of city marketing, release of resources for culture and tourism and mobile services for culture and tourism. Based on market-oriented and socialized mechanism, these platforms have played their role in building up Shanghai’s image. The city has organized various events to promote its image. It will set up a mechanism to release resources for culture and tourism within this year and implement the digital application of “Tour Shanghai” to provide comprehensive services for culture and tourism.

Shanghai sticks to mutual opening with acceleration of communication and integration to expand the coverage of city image promotion. Based on the national strategy of integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta Region, the growth of culture and tourism is a broad issue covering businesses, livelihood and integrated platform construction. In the first half, the Shanghai Administration of Culture and Tourism implemented three main tasks: one is to sign strategic cooperation agreements for launching “tourism card for Yangtze River Delta Region”, routes of famous cities, towns, villages, mountains, lakes, gardens and museums in the region, community-based markets of tourism in the region, release of red list and black list for companies in culture and tourism to keep improving the Yangtze River Delta region’s attractiveness and competitiveness in culture and tourism. Another is to enhance mutual communication. Shanghai delegates have been to more than 10 countries and regions so far this year to conduct cultural communication and tourism promotion to showcase Shanghai’s image. The last one is to make good use of “festivals, competitions and conferences”. Through the important events like the 12th China Art Festival and F1, Shanghai has promoted fine routes in the Yangtze River Delta. The city will try its best to make use of events at the doorstep to promote culture and tourism, with the host of the Shanghai Tourism Festival, Shanghai International Art Festival and in particular, the China International Import Expo in the second half.

Second: vigorous improvement of the efficiency of public cultural services

In the past few years, Shanghai made great progress in the construction of various cultural facilities at all levels. At present, Shanghai is focusing on the goal of building a modern public cultural service system by the end of 2019, which has five characteristics, namely, equalized services, diversified supply entities, professional operation mechanism, effective public services and systematic institutional management. Generally, the system includes three main areas:

The government will weave a network of public cultural services within easy reach of the residents so as to allow them to get access to the services conveniently. First, a comprehensive four-tier network of public cultural facilities covering “city, district, subdistrict and community”has been built to establish a public cultural service circle within 10 minutes of reach by residents in downtown areas and a 15-minute one in suburban areas. About 99 percent of comprehensive cultural activities centers in residential communities across the city meet the local standards set by the government. Through the establishment of the “cultural living room at the doorstep,”the public cultural services are now fully reachable by the residents. This year, 16 districts across the city have established a main system for libraries and cultural centers. Through innovative service methods and means, new progress and breakthroughs have been made in effective matching between supply and demand, expansion of effective coverage, integration and submerge of resources as well as improvement of service equalization. New breakthroughs have been made in the level and other aspects, further consolidating the public cultural service network. Secondly, the government is promoting major construction projects of cultural facilities in an orderly manner, and accelerate the construction of major public cultural facilities projects such as the Shanghai Museum East Branch, Shanghai Library East Branch, Shanghai Grand Opera House, Cheng Shifa Art Museum, and the new Shanghai Children's Library. Thirdly, the government is enriching the connotation of the new public cultural space, promoting the construction of new public cultural spaces such as riverside areas, offices and shopping malls, transportation hubs to further expand the public cultural activities space.

The government will run a set of mechanisms properly, which cover five key areas: First, the mechanism of public culture supply. A public culture supply mechanism that covers supply and demand matching, city-district linkage, performance assessment, etc. will be established to improve the accuracy of public culture supply efficiency and promote the effectiveness of public cultural services. Secondly, the professional management mechanism for public cultural facilities. The government has vigorously promoted the professional operation of the community-level cultural activity center. About 90% of the community-level cultural activity centers across the city entrusted various entities including enterprises and social organizations to run overall or partial operation of the centers. At the same time, community-level cultural activity centers and the sub-district or town-level libraries are assessed and graded on a regular basis to improve of their quality. Thirdly, the mechanism of supply-side reform in public cultural services. The government has constantly promoted the supply-side reform in public cultural services, increase the participation of social forces, and promote diversified development of supply entities. Public cultural product procurement conferences are held every year while innovation projects involving public cultural construction and mass cultural and art projects are assessed and funded. innovation project evaluation and mass cultural project funding are organized. For every two years, a catalogue of qualified social entities is issued to attract more social forces to participate in public cultural services. Fourthly, the operation mechanism of the Shanghai Cultural Festival. The Shanghai Cultural Festival is held every year and since its establishment six years ago, nearly 300,000 activities have been conducted, serving more than 100 million people in total and building itself into a major cultural brand of Shanghai. It was named “Shanghai Top Ten News,”“Shanghai Top Ten Social Governance Innovation Projects”and becomes a“shiny business card” of the city. Fifthly, the public cultural volunteer service mechanism. The “Shanghai Cultural Volunteer Service Alliance” has been established to continuously cultivate various mass cultural groups at all levels and“cultural exchange activities” have been conducted to enhance the grassroots management capabilities.

The government will set up a platform. With science and technology innovation, Shanghai will further promote service transformation and upgrade, in order to establish the country's first provincial-level public cultural digital service platform with full coverage, which named “Cultural Shanghai Cloud” to provide “one-stop” digital public cultural services to the public. At present, there are more than 3 million registered users of Cultural Cloud and more than 3,000 online venues, of which more than 1,200 can be reserved, and the daily average views of the platform is 500,000. By deepening the "Internet Plus" model, the city will strengthen precision docking and improve the matching level of supply and demand and force public cultural institutions to continuously improve service quality and efficiency of public cultural services. In addition, Shanghai Municipal Administration of Cultural and Tourism has also issued local standards, namely the “Public Digital Culture Platform Service Guideline”.

Third: greatly improvement of the satisfaction of the tourism festival

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Shanghai Tourism Festival. In order to satisfy the demands of the residents such as “more popular” and “more satisfied”, the festival has launched 7 major activities: “opening and closing ceremonies”, “select tourism products”, “millions of citizens tour Shanghai”, "business and literature tour", "culture tour ", "Yangtze River Delta integration" and "international tourism festival". Based on the theme of Shanghai's tourism, the city will build activities and products for citizens which are delicious, fun, good-looking, good-selling, casual and good experience. The activity will focus on four key areas:

Firstly, the city’s building can be read. The event consists of four sections: first is the opening of the building and various ways of visits. Second is to scan the code and improve reading experience. Third is architectural micro-travel to meet diverse needs. Fourth is the culture and innovation market, which is the first time concentrated display. On September 22 (Sunday), Shanghai Municipal Administration of Cultural and Tourism will jointly organize the first “Building and Reading” culture and innovation market and micro-travel promotion activities in Jing'an Park in conjunction with the Six Districts' Cultural and Tourism Bureau. At that time, more than 100 kinds of cultural and creative products related to “architectural reading”, 87 micro-travel routes in six districts will also be officially launched and the media and citizens are welcome to participate in these activities.

Secondly, the city has a large collection of cultural tourism products at night. This year, the Shanghai Tourism Festival and the Shanghai Shopping Festival will jointly create a high-quality shopping environment and venues, in particular, a food festival will be held to promote the gourmet night market. The theme catering activities such as “Julu Road 158 Food Night Market”, Jinjiang Paradise Night Market, “Yangtze River German Beer Festival”, “Pudong Holiday Hotel Munich Beer Festival” and “City Beer Festival” have become the new growth point of “night economy”. At the same time, the city will continue to do a good night museum exhibition.

Thirdly, the city will strengthen the culture integration of the Yangtze River Delta. Shanghai Municipal Administration of Cultural and Tourism will hold the first Yangtze River Delta Cultural Tourism Market from September 21 to September 22 at the Shanghai Village Commercial Plaza in Shanghai International Tourism Resort. The city will invite more than 100 branded resorts, well-known theme parks, high-end home stay, specialty gifts and classic culture and innovative products in the Yangtze River Delta region to participate in the exhibition, in order to create a direct sales and promotion platform for high-quality tourism products in the region. The “Phoenix Cup” Shanghai Riding Festival launches a cross-provincial cycling route from Shanghai to Suzhou. The business and cultural activities of the Yangtze River Delta Ecological Demonstration Zone will achieve the exchange and interaction of geopolitical culture. In addition, the first Yangtze River Delta Cultural Tourism Photography Interactive Exhibition will be held and excellent photographers from three provinces and one city will be invited to participate.

Fourthly, the city will show its status as the international metropolis. Shanghai Tourism Festival is a festival that opens its doors to the world. In this year's event arrangement, Shanghai's folk custom tourism activities are specially launched to attract more international tourists, such as the Belt and Road folk culture exhibition and organized the third national team of the Belt and Road to conduct a five-day tour at the Oriental Pearl Plaza. The city also launches the "Shanghai International Family Day" Carnival in Minhang District and Jing'an “Lane Style Tour" and other activities.