Quanzhou releases action plan to build a national key city for inbound tourism

On September 23, at the 2026 Quanzhou Cultural and Tourism Economic Development Conference, the World Heritage City of Quanzhou, Fujian officially released the Action Plan for Building a National Key City for Inbound Tourism. With a work system of "one core goal, two policy empowerment, three international promotions, and four global collaborations," the plan aims to fully activate the momentum of inbound tourism development and strive to build a world-renowned Maritime Silk Road cultural tourism destination that is shared by both hosts and guests.

Quanzhou is a rare destination in China with the whole city listed on the The World Heritage List. With the successful inclusion of "Quanzhou: China's World Marine Trade Center in the Song and Yuan Dynasties" in the The World Heritage List, the popularity of local cultural tourism has continued to rise in recent years. In July 2026, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism released the "15th Five Year Plan for Building a Tourism Strong Country", and Quanzhou was included in the list of key cities for cultivating inbound tourism in China. The release of this action plan marks a new stage in the internationalization of Quanzhou's cultural and tourism development.

According to the plan, Quanzhou will take the construction of a national key city for inbound tourism as the overall driving force, establish a high-level coordinated inbound tourism scheduling mechanism, systematically solve the key, difficult and bottleneck points in the development process, and promote the quality and expansion of inbound tourism. At the policy level, the local government will implement a three-year action plan to promote the high-quality development of inbound tourism, and introduce the "Several Measures of Quanzhou City on Cultivating New Growth Points in Cultural and Tourism Consumption", focusing on optimizing the international tourism service system, expanding the scale of inbound tourists, enhancing inbound tourism consumption, promoting the overseas and international dissemination of non heritage cultural and creative industries, and implementing the "one optimization and dual enhancement project" of "excellent services, increased customer sources, and increased consumption" for inbound tourism.

In terms of international promotion and global cooperation, Quanzhou will promote three international promotion plans, including the "Ten Million, Ten Thousand, and Ten Thousand Maritime Silk Road Tour", Quanzhou's intangible cultural heritage going global, and the improvement of international festival IP quality. At the same time, four major global cooperation actions will be implemented, including the cooperation and release of national level overseas institutions, the cooperation and interconnection of Silk Road tourism cities, the expansion of international OTA customer sources, and the "Third Eye" look at Quanzhou. By expanding the global cooperation network, the radiation radius of customer sources will be expanded.

As the world-renowned "largest port in the East" of the Song and Yuan dynasties, Quanzhou is attempting to recreate the historical prosperity of "merchants from all over the world amidst the rising sea" and "people from ten common cities". At present, as inbound tourism has become an important driving force for cultural and tourism growth, whether this World Heritage City can use its policy system and global cooperation network to transform World Heritage and Maritime Silk Road culture into sustainable international passenger flow and consumption is worth continuous observation by the industry.