Global visitors are flooding cities and counties in China during the Spring Festival to join the celebrations, and experience Chinese traditional cultures and activities.
In east China's Jiangsu Province, international tourists gathered in Jianhu County to watch traditional local Huai Opera and acrobatics.
"I just watched acrobatics and Huai Opera here, and found that China's Spring Festival is so interesting and joyful," said tourist Almaz.
In addition to enjoying the shows, tourists are also invited to put on traditional costumes and learn to perform Huai Opera on the stage. Other cultural activities and workshops also attracted global tourists to participate, like making hand-made soybean milk with stone mills and learning Chinese traditional paper-cutting.
"It's my first time in China, my first time to celebrate Chinese New Year. I love (Chinese) culture. The design (of the costume) is also so interesting. I think it also shows Chinese culture," said Ibroimov Ibrat, who gave himself the Chinese name “Weili,” which means mighty power.
In Beijing, a Spring Festival party was held in Tiantan (Temple of Heaven)Park, where emperors used to hold annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvest. As a part of the Beijing Central Axis building complex, a newly inscribed world heritage, Tiantan is one of Beijing's most iconic ancient buildings.
To showcase the culture of Beijing Central Axis, the event features lion dances, traditional ritual music performances, and a series of interactive activities to introduce intangible heritages, attracting visitors from home and abroad.
"I experienced some of the intangible heritage activities today, for example, I tried calligraphy and wrote a 'Fu' (good fortune). I also got to know China's 12 zodiac animals. I believe that we can learn about Chinese culture through activities like this, and it is very meaningful," said a student from Iran.
International travelers in China enjoy Spring Festival celebrations
Financial institutions in China's Shanghai and Tianjin are building incubators for the development of sci-tech startups.
In Shanghai, more than 40 sci-tech startups have settled in the Zhangjiang Incubator of the Pudong Development Bank Innovation Center, covering multiple fields such as integrated circuits, biomedicine, and artificial intelligence.
The Zhangjiang Incubator not only provides offices, account settlement and policy declaration for the startups, but also helps them secure loans, negotiate business deals, and find investments.
A company in the field of artificial blood vessels received a credit loan from the bank even without any income. Because it moved into the incubator, the bank knew its startup team, research progress, and growth very well.
"The bank granted us a credit loan, and it was because of this credit loan that we completed the construction of our factory, which also helped us secure a new round of financing of 30 million yuan (about 4.14 million U.S. dollars). With the factory and this financing, we were able to enter the phases of clinical trials," said Dai Weimin, chairman of Sunna Technologies (Shanghai) Company.
In north China's Tianjin Municipality, the Tiankai Higher Education Innovation Park was established, where enterprises in the park can benefit from joint support from technology, industry to finance. Financial institutions have set up branches in the park to provide comprehensive services for startups.
"We do not meet the typical conditions for bank loans. Because we are in a special incubator environment of the Tiankai Higher Education Innovation Park and have an investment-loan linkage product from the Agricultural Bank of China, we are able to secure our first loan to overcome significant difficulties," said He Jianjun, general manager of Tianrun Hanyang Technology (Tianjin) Company.
"Over 90 percent of the companies in the innovation park are early-stage private enterprises. We have launched several financial products tailored to the companies in the Tiankai Higher Education Innovation Park based on their characteristics. Meanwhile, we actively assist these enterprises in facilitating investment and financing connections and strengthen cooperation with small and medium-sized guarantee companies to address the medium- to long-term large financing needs of these businesses," said Han Le, deputy manager of the Tianjin Nankai Sub-branch of the Agricultural Bank of China.
China's financial institutions create business incubators for sci-tech startups