Given Shanghai's ambitious target for its tourism industry, Disneyland and the second phase of Happy Valley (above), a local theme park, will be two important construction projects for the city. [Photo / China Daily]
SHANGHAI - Shanghai, China's financial and business center, plans to build itself into an international tourism destination and is setting the goal of increasing revenue from tourism by 70 percent within five years.
Revenue from tourism totaled 305.3 billion yuan ($46.4 billion) in 2010, a 30 percent increase over the previous year, according to figures from the Shanghai Tourism Industry Development Conference.
By 2015, however, it hopes to generate 520 billion yuan annually, a 70 percent jump compared with 2010. The city aims to attract 240 million domestic and 10 million foreign visitors by 2015.
Shanghai wants to develop tourism into a strategic industry, expecting it to create 300,000 jobs and contribute 8.5 percent to the city's GDP by 2015, said Yu Zhengsheng, head of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, at the conference.
Local media reported that the municipal government will invest more than 40 billion yuan in 13 municipal-level tourism projects, including a planned Disneyland theme park, over the next five years.
"Disneyland and the second phase of Happy Valley will be the two most important construction projects in the next few years," said Shanghai Vice-Mayor Zhao Wen.
However, Zhao Huanyan, a tourism industry expert from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, believes that the investment in Disneyland, along with associated supporting projects, will exceed the 40-billion-yuan mark reported by local media.