Zhang Yu

JeniZhang13@163.com

THE Overseas Chinese Town Holdings Co. (OCT Group), a State-owned enterprise whose businesses cover the fields of tourism and related cultural industry, has shared its practices in building beautiful villages at an event held in Shenzhen yesterday.

The event, called “Happy Life Festival,” officially kicked off at the OCT Creative Exhibition Center and the Breeze Square of OCT Harbor in Nanshan District. The festival started yesterday and will run until Sunday.

The festival aims to better summarize the experience of OCT Group in developing beautiful villages in China, and to provide a useful reference for the revitalization of villages in other regions and across the whole country, said the Shenzhen-based company.

In 2016, OCT Group released its medium and long-term development strategy, putting forward the “100 Beautiful Villages” program for the first time as part of its efforts to echo China’s rural revitalization strategy in breathing new life into rural areas.

The program aims to explore a new mode of integrated cultural and tourism development and promote integrated urban-rural development by exploring the characteristics and traditional culture of the countryside and adjusting measures to local conditions.

“Over the past five years, OCT Group has been practicing its social responsibilities as a State-owned enterprise, making strategic layouts in the vast rural land of China, and has initially developed a number of beautiful model villages with distinctive characteristics,” said Xue Lijun, deputy Party chief of OCT Group.

OCT Group will continue to give full play to its advantages in the cultural tourism industry and inject a new vitality into Chinese villages during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), according to the company.

President Xi Jinping first put forward the idea of “implementing the strategy of rural revitalization” during the country’s top legislature’s annual meeting in 2017, and called it a major strategy with fundamental impact on people’s livelihood.

The implementation of the strategy plays a significant role in China’s journey to becoming a well-off society by 2020 and a modern powerful socialist one.

Sponsored by OCT Group, the festival is organized by OCT Hainan Group and OCT Urban Entertainment Operation Co. Ltd.