It is not known whether Xi Jinping has ever strapped planks to his feet and raced down a mountain at speed. But at a banquet welcoming dignitaries to the opening of the Asian Winter Games in the north-eastern city of Harbin on February 7th, China’s leader made clear that he hoped more compatriots would soon be shredding the gnar. “Ice and snow are as valuable as gold and silver,” he said, suggesting that frozen water could be an engine for Harbin’s “high-quality development”. Plastered across national media, his comments are a push to develop everything from snowboard lessons and winter homestays to self-heating ski socks and snow-making machines as part of “the ice-and-snow economy”.
Exhortations of this sort have helped Harbin—one of China’s coldest cities with temperatures regularly falling below -20°C—become one of its hottest destinations. Last winter, the city received 87m visitors, a fourfold increase from the previous year (helped by a post-covid rush). Tourism revenue shot up sixfold. Some 12m tourists visited Harbin during the recent lunar new year holiday, up by 20% from last year, according to state media.
For decades, locals have cut blocks of ice out of the frozen Songhua River and carved them into statues. In recent years, the sculptures have become grander in scale and design. The city became a social-media sensation last winter, with whole ice buildings lit up. Most tourists are domestic. “Chinese people, especially we southerners, yearn for snow,” says Ms Chen, visiting with her son from Hangzhou.
With growth slowing, China is betting on winter sports and tourism to give its economy—especially in the north-east—a lift. The government says it wants the sector to be worth 1.5trn yuan ($205bn) by 2030. Some progress is being made. During last year’s winter season, 26m people visited China’s national-level ski resorts around the country, creating 19bn yuan in revenue, up 140% from the previous year. In 2014 Mr Xi said he wanted to get 300m (nearly the population of America) into winter sports. The government says it hit that target before hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, which further spurred middle-class demand. By the end of 2023 China had 1,912 skating rinks, triple the number five years previously, and the number of ski resorts had nearly doubled, to 935.
The frigid rustbelt needs all the help it can get. The provinces of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang—roughly the area formerly known as Manchuria, and now called “Dongbei” meaning “north-east”—were among the country’s wealthiest during the Mao era. But after economic reforms were launched in 1978, the region’s dependence on the state sector and heavy industry meant that it fell behind southern cities better positioned for light manufacturing and exports. The state has tried to revitalise Dongbei for more than two decades, to little effect. An ageing population and over-reliance on hard-to-reform state-owned enterprises are difficult problems to resolve. In 2023 Heilongjiang had the second-lowest gdp per person and a population shrinking at the fastest rate of all Chinese provinces. With or without crampons, Mr Xi has a mountain to climb.
Plenty of people are sceptical that the ice-and-snow economy can lead to long-term change. More tourism can help at the margins, but “the ski resort does not solve the structural-adjustment problem,” says Andrew Batson of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing.
Something is better than nothing, though. The latest efforts to diversify the Dongbei economy have created new, well-paid jobs for young people whom the region has struggled to retain. On the outskirts of Daqing, an oil city west of Harbin, the slopes are busy. Gao Yu, a ski instructor, says he is paid about 7,500 yuan each month, almost double the average salary in Daqing. Local authorities are now trying to boost the summer-tourism trade, not least for those fleeing the southern heat, so that income keeps flowing even after the ice and snow have melted away. ■
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