CHANGCHUN, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Jilin City of northeast China's Jilin Province, which has cultivated winter Olympic champions such as Li Jianrou and Wu Dajing, has built a high-level ice and snow industrial gathering place by relying on local ice and snow resources.
Liu Fei, mayor of Jilin City, said that Jilin will leverage the edges of its local unique resource and strive to build the city into the world’s ice and snow tourism destination.
At present, the city owns overall 12 ski resorts each with good snow quality, thick snow, and long snow period characteristics.
During these years, Jilin has undertaken the world freestyle skiing aerials competition, the national mass alpine skiing championship, the national ice hockey league, the national figure skating championship and other large-scale events.
In 2018, 75,000 students in Jilin took snow lessons. At present, Jilin city has organized 15 primary and secondary school hockey teams and opened 8 youth hockey clubs.
Wang Yiming, director of Jilin City Sports Bureau, introduced that the city has won 152 medals in the international and national competitions during the past two seasons. 989 snow and ice athletes have registered in the province by now.
Jilin rime is one of China's four meteorological wonders. "Enjoy the Jilin rime in winter" has become a popular route promoted by major domestic tourism websites and travel agencies.
"Combining the tourism with ice and snow sports, we can increase the number of landscapes, enrich the content of tourists' experience and create high-quality ice and snow tourism products." said Yan Haichun, director of Jilin City's cultural, radio and television, and tourism bureau.
In the 2018-2019 snow season (from November to March of the next year), Jilin received 29.3 million tourists, up 15 percent year on year. Tourism revenue reached 49 billion yuan, up 19 percent year on year.
Faced the question of how to better connect with the world, Jilin city has chosen developed areas in ice and snow industry such as Switzerland, France and Japan as a benchmark to make detailed planning on the spatial layout of snow field resources, snow industry in trans-Beidahu region and local transportation.
Recently, the city has planned to improve the sports service guarantee system of international ice and snow venues such as Beidahu ski resort, Vanke Songhua Lake ski resort and Beishan all-weather cross-country ski resort. Besides, the city will build the international all-weather ice comprehensive training base and snow comprehensive training base.
Combining the development of ice and snow industry and the industrial foundation of northeast China, Jilin city planned to build the whole industry chain of ice and snow equipment. At present, the city planned to team up with the international leading equipment manufacturing enterprises to introduce cable car, snow machine and other projects.
In the future, the city will promote the technological development and achievements transformation of ice and snow sports equipment, light intelligent wearable equipment, protective clothing as well as ice and snow intelligent equipment, Wang Deling, head of Jilin City's science and technology bureau, pointed out. (Edited by Yang Yifan, yangyifan@xinhua.org)
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