"Tourism Year" boosts Sino-ROK friendship

With the arrival of the year 2015, Sino-ROK tourism continues to heat up. On January 23, the grand opening ceremony for "China Tourism Year" was held in Seoul, South Korea.

During President Xi Jinping’s visit to South Korea last July, the two countries jointly made the decision on hosting the "Tourism Years” in 2015 and 2016 respectively as "China Tourism Year" and "Korea Tourism Year”. Now, the curtains for China and South Korea "Tourism Year" have been slowly drawn.

It is of great significance that the consensus between the heads of the two countries has received prompt and positive responses from both governments and societies.

According to the latest statistics, the target set by the presidents of the countries was met two years ahead of the deadline after the number of tourists traveling between the countries exceeded 10 million in the year 2014. China and South Korea have mutually become the largest tourist source country and the outbound tourism destination of each other.

At the beginning of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Korea in1992, there were only less than 20 million personnel exchanges. However, this number surmounted ten million last year, which means that in the last 22 years, the bilateral tourism exchanges has grown by 500%. Currently, there are tens of thousands of passengers traveling between China and South Korea every single day. This large-scale tourism exchange leads to the formation of magnificent amount of "human resource flow", "capital flow", "information flow" and "commodity flow", which, in return, serve as a strong impetus to the bilateral economic and trade cooperation.

China and South Korea are closely connected geographically, traditionally, and culturally. Their respectively distinctive, yet highly complementary tourism resources boasts great market potential for the development of tourism. Therefore, we have every reason to believe that further cooperation in tourism between China and Korea will bring new power to strengthen the bilateral strategic partnership.

During his visit to South Korea last year, President Xi Jinping pointed out that if the cooperation in politics, economy and security is the main force to promote the development of relations between two countries, then people and cultural exchanges can be said to be invisible power to strengthen the emotional and spiritual communication. Undoubtedly, with the booming of “tourism year”, the communications among citizens in these two countries will be reinforced, and there will always be solid foundation for a friendly Sino-ROK relationship.