Recently, ten government bodies, including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism ("MCT"), have distributed the Circular on Issuing the Implementation Plans for Building Pilot Border Tourism Areas in Manzhouli of Inner Mongolia and Fangchenggang of Guangxi (the "Circular").
The Circular announces two policy documents, namely the Implementation Plan for Building a Pilot Border Tourism Area in Manzhouli of Inner Mongolia (the "Plan") and the Implementation Plan for Building a Pilot Border Tourism Area in Fangchenggang of Guangxi. In particular, the Plan states that by 2020, the construction of the pilot area will be driven ahead in all aspects, and a system of border tourism products with unique characteristics will basically come into being, and notable breakthroughs will be achieved in reforming and innovating the tourism management systems and mechanisms. Accordingly, the Plan lays out tasks in four respects, including "exploring policies to expand the opening-up of tourism" and "establishing a framework of policies for the sake of tourism industry development". According to the Plan, efforts will be made to support investment and entrepreneurship in the tourism segment, make it more convenient to make investment in border tourism, and ease limits on the entry to service sectors in relation to border tourism in an orderly manner; furthermore, financial institutions will be guided and encouraged to relax credit restrictions on tourism enterprises and broaden ways for the finance sector to support the tourism industry.