China gets a tourism boost

Toilet revolution: A cleaner entering a beetle-shaped toilet at a park in Beijing. — Reuters

CHINA’S domestic tourism market has been booming in the last decade, with a 10% annual growth on average and spending is expected to reach around US$890bil (RM3.62 trillion) by 2020.

However, the bottleneck in China’s domestic tourism market is now none other than its “inadequate, dirty and chaotic” toilets. As Li Jinzao, head of the China National Tourism Administration, pointed out, a dirty toilet destroys the efforts of all kinds of tourist resort promotions and their negative impact is hard to erase.