Culture, tourism industries expo closes in Wuhan

The three-day 2025 China Culture and Tourism Industries Expo (CTIE) concluded Sunday in Wuhan, the capital of central China's Hubei Province.

The event drew more than 2,000 domestic exhibitors and 50 overseas travel agencies and attracted around 225,000 visitors.

The expo featured a 40,000-square-meter outdoor area with a cultural and tourism IP parade of floats. A 60,000-square-meter indoor exhibition hall showcased new business models, scenarios, and products in the cultural and tourism sectors, including digital clusters, low-altitude tourism, and intangible cultural heritage creative products.

Over the past three days, on-site sales of cultural and tourism products reached 170 million yuan (about 23.9 million U.S. dollars), five industry matchmaking sessions generated business deals worth 810 million yuan, and project signing ceremonies secured agreements totaling 23.28 billion yuan.

The highlight of the expo was the combination of high technology and cultural tourism.

Driven by innovations such as robotics and immersive 3D experiences, China's new cultural business models have maintained annual revenue growth of about 10 percent in recent years, becoming a key driver of the sector's high-quality development.

China's outstanding aggregate social financing -- the total amount of financing to the real economy -- reached 442.12 trillion yuan (about 63.4 trillion U.S. dollars) as of the end of 2025, up 8.3 percent year on year, central bank data showed on Thursday.

The country's aggregate social financing stood at 35.6 trillion yuan (about 5.1 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2025, up by 3.34 trillion yuan (about 479 billion U.S. dollars) from the year 2024, said the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the country's central bank.

According to the data, the M2, a broad measure of money supply that covers cash in circulation and all deposits, increased 8.5 percent year on year to 340.29 trillion yuan (about 48.8 trillion U.S. dollars) as of the end of December.

In addition, outstanding yuan loans stood at 271.91 trillion yuan (about 39 trillion U.S. dollars) at the end of 2025, up 6.4 percent year on year.