As the peak consumption season of Spring Festival approaches, many provinces and cities have taken the opportunity to promote consumption by holding special events.

As the traditional peak consumption season of Spring Festival approaches, cities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hainan, Sichuan and other regions have recently made special arrangements for the atmosphere creation and promotion of consumption during the holiday, pressing the “accelerator” for consumption升温.

In 2023, the proportion of final consumption of China’s residents in GDP reached 56%, with broad room for improvement. The Central Economic Work Conference held in December last year placed “vigorously boosting consumption, improving investment efficiency, and expanding domestic demand in all directions” at the top of nine key tasks this year, highlighting the importance of promoting consumption and expanding domestic demand.

On January 9th, the Wuxi Municipal Committee in Jiangsu Province held a conference on promoting consumption, requiring that stimulating consumption vitality be placed at the top priority, implementing special actions to boost consumption, and striving to build an international consumption center city.

According to Wuxi Daily,市委书记Du Xiaogang emphasized the need to grasp the opportunity of the state’s expansion of the implementation of the “two new” policies, amplify the open advantages of 240-hour visa-free and overseas tax refund, combine with local consumer product characteristics, explore the consumption increment from the production end to the consumption end and from brand stores to regional headquarters; innovate diversified consumer scenes, develop new consumption such as event economy, exhibition economy, silver hair economy, Spring Festival gala economy, film economy, and “other economy”, leverage housing, automobile, home appliances and other major consumer goods, especially focus on the needs of the elderly and children to tap potential and increase vitality.

He said, “Consumption is a function of income”, so it is necessary to accelerate the construction of a modern industrial system to create more high value-added employment opportunities; implement employment support plans for key fields, key industries, urban and rural areas, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises and strengthen the multi-level social security system to improve consumption capacity, willingness and level.

The issuance of special vouchers is a measure to boost consumption. In the first quarter of this year, Ningbo City in Zhejiang Province will issue a total quota of消费券 expected to be 200 million yuan, mainly involving new car purchases, second-hand car transactions, catering consumption, shopping malls and other consumer areas. On January 6th, Mayor Tang Feifan presided over a municipal government executive meeting to deploy the iteration and improvement of消费券 and the first-phase消费券 issuance work. The meeting requires optimizing the structure of消费券, focusing on housing, performing arts events, and innovation and entrepreneurship to amplify the leading role of consumption; at the same time strengthen whole-process monitoring and timely evaluation to dynamically adjust categories and organizational forms according to the pulling effect to improve the precision and effectiveness of消费券 issuance.

In addition, cities such as Sanya in Hainan Province, Mianyang in Sichuan Province, and Taizhou in Jiangsu Province have also held special meetings to build high-quality consumer destinations through optimizing supply, improving environment and creating innovative scenes to better play the fundamental role of consumption in economic development.

Sanya International Tourism City has set an expected target of achieving a GDP growth of around 6.5% and a retail sales growth of around 10% this year. On the 8th day of the month, the Municipal Committee held a special meeting to listen to the report on promoting measures to expand consumption in the first quarter. The meeting pointed out that consumption is both the largest variable and most promising incremental factor for Sanya’s economic growth. It is necessary to take unprecedented measures to ensure that a series of policies are implemented effectively to expand consumption and stabilize growth.

According to the deployment plan, Sanya will use event-based promotion to seize first-quarter consumer trends by planning a series of exhibitions and promotional activities that will be held “throughout every week”. The city will continue to focus on areas such as duty-free shopping areas, shopping malls integrated with tourism attractions, automobiles and home appliances to precisely distribute vouchers while connecting with policies related to appliance replacement to boost consumption. Sanya will also attract more leading platform enterprises to settle in order to cultivate new growth points for consumption by leveraging platform economy effects. The city will also increase publicity and promotion by taking advantage of nationwide celebrations during Spring Festival to showcase Sanya’s tourism policies, products and services better creating a new Spring tourism and consumer atmosphere.