Southwest China's Yunnan Province expects to see many more tourists by the time 2005 rolls around, said a leading official of the province.

According to the province's 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-05), Yunnan will be host to 1.5 million overseas tourists and 55 million domestic sightseers in the year 2005, the result of an average yearly growth rate of 9.5 percent and 8.3 percent respectively, said Shao Qiwei, vice-governor of the province.

At an average growth rate of 11.4 percent per annum, the province's foreign exchange tourism revenues will reach US$550 million in 2005 while domestic tourism revenues will hit 28 billion yuan (US$3.4 billion) for an average yearly growth rate of 9.2 percent, Shao said.

The provincial government will seek more channels to enlarge investment in tourism, one of the province's pillar industries, said Li Jiating, governor of Yunnan, at a provincial working conference on tourism recently.

State-owned tourism enterprises will be reorganized or directly turned into share-holding corporations, according to Li.

An increasing number of tourism companies will go public in two years. Foreign co-operation is being encouraged to boost tourism, the governor said.

Yunnan wants to become a major Asian international tourist destination, and draw a hefty economic boost from this, the official said.

During the Ninth Five-Year Plan period (1996-2000), the province saw booming growth in tourism with an average yearly growth rate of 10.9 percent for overseas tourists, 3.2 percentage points higher than the country's average overseas tourism growth rate.

In the past five years, the province's foreign exchange revenues from tourism reached US$1.4 billion with a per annum average growth rate of 15.5 percent, 3.9 percentage point higher than the country's average growth rate for the industry, official statistics indicate.

(China Daily 03/02/2001)