NBCIF concludes with fruitful results

The 2021 China (Ningbo) Cultural Industries Fair concluded in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province on Nov 30.

The five-day event was held online for the first time. It was attended by more than 330 enterprises in the culture and tourism sectors from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, as well as other areas.

The online fair had garnered 70 million viewers as of Nov 30, with the number expected to top 100 million. The series of activities that the organizers launched on Douyin, the Chinese version of video-sharing app TikTok, will run until Dec 6.

Its opening ceremony was broadcast live on 29 platforms, attracting more than 10 million online viewers.

A major highlight of the event was a program where artists promoted local folk culture, cuisine, and operas via livestreams, which drew over 1 million viewers and more than 500,000 likes.

The fair has also shined a spotlight on films, short videos, and how some local places like Gejia village have achieved rural revitalization via art.

Ningbo has hosted the NBCIF for the past five years, and the scale of the exhibition, the number of visitors, the level of internationalization, as well as the trade opportunities created by the fair have increased each time, said Li Guijun, deputy head of the publicity department of the Ningbo committee of the Communist Party of China.

As of the end of the third quarter of this year, Ningbo had more than 50,000 registered cultural enterprises.

The added value of local cultural and creative industries surged from 58.6 billion yuan ($9 billion) in 2016 to 98.7 billion yuan in 2020, with an average annual growth rate of 14.1 percent.

The proportion of GDP generated by cultural and creative industries in the city's GDP increased from 6.9 percent to 8 percent.