Long march tourism boosts heritage protection

Poverty alleviation

After visiting Liping's Red tourism spots, visitors can visit a nearby tea park, where they can pick tea leaves, taste the beverage and enjoy the dances and music of the local Dong culture.

Yang Zuhua, an executive at the Liping Conference Memorial Hall, said Liping is trying to make full use of Red tourism to allow the proposed national cultural park to have "skeleton, flesh and blood".

In an article he wrote for China Daily this year, Liu Jianping, a professor of Red tourism at Xiangtan University in Hunan province, said such tourism has greatly boosted economy and helped to alleviate poverty and it will facilitate rural revitalization in the central and western regions.

"To boost Red tourism, the government built 2,442 km of roads from 2017 to 2020 to connect revolutionary sites, with more than 90 percent of those roads in Central and Western China," Liu said.

"Just as the War of Independence is an integral part of the United States' history, the Long March is a glorious chapter in China's revolutionary history. But it is necessary to stay true to the fundamental purpose of highlighting the importance of revolutionary sites and refrain from excessive commercialization or spreading inaccurate information to please tourists."