China the engine room of tourism growth

Mr Rudd told the Australian Tourism Directions Conference in Canberra on Thursday the industry has to change the way it approaches the nation's most promising market.

"This is the Asia-Pacific century and China is very much the engine room of regional growth right across the Asia Pacific," he told delegates.

Tourism visits to Australia last year from Malaysia had risen by 14 per cent, from India by 11 per cent, Hong Kong by 10 per cent and Singapore by nine per cent, Mr Rudd said.

"If I have one message for you today it's let's open our thinking about China to an entirely new paradigm, and that is newly-emerging urban China across 101 centres, each representing a dynamic market in itself.

"Don't assume that people sitting out in a city of five million people in the middle of Hunan Province know a whole lot about what (Australia) has to offer.

"I believe it was last year that for the first time in five thousand years, more people were living in cities in China than live in the countryside.

"China's urban population has increased by 446 million people over the last 30 years and now dwarfs that of both the United States and Europe combined, and the gap will continue to grow."

Mr Rudd said what is being seen now is an historic shift from the countryside to the cities and an historic increase in the country's per capita income.

He told delegates the rise of China's second tier cities was a phenomenon which Australia's tourism industry needed to grasp.

"Right across China we now have 93 cities with a population in excess of five million and eight with a population in excess of 10 million.

"Each of these are discrete regional and sub-regional markets.

"My word of encouragement to this industry is to focus further and further on each of the markets which each of those principal cities represents, many of which you will never have heard of, but each of which is bigger than the city of Sydney."

Source - ninemsn.com.au