North China's Shanxi province is working full-out to promote the top-quality development of its cultural and tourism industry – a process it's begun in recent years – to achieve its goal of becoming an internationally renowned cultural and tourism destination.

Focusing on both the supply and demand sides, Shanxi has been cultivating and bolstering the strategic pillar industry of culture and tourism.

Last year, the number of visits and the ticket revenue at key scenic spots in the province increased by 1.6 times and 2.2 times respectively, making hefty contributions to promoting its transformation and development.

In addition, Shanxi is fully leveraging its cultural and tourism cloud resources and cloud platforms to promote government scientific decision-making and industry supervision – and to provide a comprehensive tourism service application platform for tourists.

Moving forwards, plans are for the province to prioritize the integrated development of tourism and other industries and the innovation of tourism products and services.

What's more, there are also plans for the digital upgrading of the cultural and tourism industry, as well as its cultural heritage inheritance, protection and utilization.

Meanwhile, Zhao Shuguang, deputy director of the Culture and Tourism Department of Shanxi Province, stated that to build up a new Shanxi tourism brand, efforts would be made to establish three international tourism gateway cities – namely, Taiyuan, Datong and Yuncheng.

Furthermore, the province will work to create a number of well-known tourist cities, counties and towns and promote the construction of service support facilities for tourism roads.