Tongcheng, bookings for factory tours rose more than 36 per cent year-on-year during this summer season, with families accounting for 68 per cent of bookings, according to a popular Chinese online travel booking platform. China’s factory floors have turned out to be sought after destinations during summer vacation this year. There has been a visible rise in tours to hi-tech manufacturing facilities like electric vehicles, electronics, and high-speed trains, with shipyards and breweries also in the mix.
These factory-technology tours are part of the growing phenomenon of industrial tourism ( gongye luyou ) – a policy initiative actively promoted by the ruling Communist Party-state. Rather than make these tours from a sightseeing perspective, The state seeks to make them niche tourism an instrument for showcasing industrial capability, strengthening industrial brands, and educating young people about technology. The origins of China’s industrial tourism dates back to the 1990s when industrial enterprises like breweries, dairy farms and petrochemicals sought to use tourism for building better consumer relationships. It marked the formalisation of the phenomenon of industrial tourism. This convergence of revolutionary and industrial heritage provides the foundation for the promotion of industrial tourism in advanced technology sectors over the last decade. In May this year, a joint document issued by seven departments including the Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Ministry of Education, explicitly called for expanding the supply of industrial tourism products, promoting more factory tours, activating industrial museums, and turning more manufacturing facilities into tourist destinations. This cross-departmental policy makes promotion of industrial tourism systematic and widens the scope into areas such as aerospace, robotics, e-commerce, and logistics, where China has been expanding its capabilities. The policy integrates industrial heritage, cultural tourism, innovation, education and consumption. Local governments too have joined in, crafting policies suited to their jurisdictions. For instance, the city of Beijing has made plans to integrate its tech hubs into tourism routes to open up robotics factories and autonomous vehicle labs for public viewing. it could select some industrial hubs for tourism and promote them under ‘Learn in India’ While the Indian government prioritises the ‘Make in India’ initiative to boost the country’s manufacturing ambitions. Building industrial tourism circuits in States with higher number of manufacturing zones – like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Gujarat – is another idea worth experimenting. All of this require Inter-ministerial coordination and joint initiatives.
In 2024, the city had 15 million industrial tourists and generated 1.7 billion yuan ($248 million) in revenue, according to Beijing city’s municipal bureau. The central government built on the local experiments to standardise locations, and in 2004, officially designated 306 sites across China under the national industrial and agricultural tourism rubric. In addition, the Communist Party of China has also emphasised on preserving industrial heritage sites, especially in the revolutionary base areas during their conflict with Japanese forces as well as the Kuomintang in the civil war before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Presently, China has 264 designated national industrial heritage sites.
