Since its opening in January 2025, the Han Dan Avenue Historical and Cultural Block has rapidly become a nationally recognized cultural tourism phenomenon. During the National Day holiday in 2025, it welcomed over 1.9363 million visitors, and the number surged past 2.8338 million during the 2026 Spring Festival holiday, establishing itself as a core landmark for urban renewal and cultural-tourism integration in Han Dan. This ancient street, bearing three thousand years of urban history, has been revitalized through a blend of old and new, mirroring how the Chinese economy navigates challenges and achieves breakthroughs, using its micro-level vitality to reflect broader macro trends. This vividly demonstrates the formidable resilience of the Chinese economy in resisting risks, self-recovering, and sustaining growth within a vast, unified national market.
The immense popularity of Han Dan Avenue serves as a living testament to the resilience of China's domestic demand market. Functioning as Han Dan's "urban living room," it connects historical sites like Hui Che Alley and Xue Bu Bridge, integrating intangible cultural heritage experiences, cultural and creative retail, and specialty dining. This not only transforms dormant cultural resources into tangible consumption experiences but also stimulates an overall warming of the city's consumer market. This success is underpinned by Han Dan's impressive performance, where the growth rate of total retail sales of consumer goods ranked first in the province for eight consecutive months in 2025, and the value-added of the tertiary industry increased by 7.5% year-on-year. Nationally, the immense domestic market of over 1.4 billion people, including a middle-income group exceeding 400 million, constitutes the core confidence for China's economy to withstand external fluctuations and maintain stable growth. The continuous emergence of popular cultural tourism districts and new consumption formats and scenarios across the country infuses the Chinese economy with a steady stream of endogenous momentum.
The growth of Han Dan Avenue also witnesses the resilience of China's urban transformation and upgrading. As a traditional resource-based industrial city, Han Dan long faced challenges from a heavy industrial structure and significant transformation pressures. The urban renewal and cultural-tourism integration exemplified by Han Dan Avenue represent a key strategy to overcome these challenges. By revitalizing underutilized urban spaces and activating cultural IP value, it has cultivated a new engine for economic growth. In 2025, Han Dan's GDP grew by 6.4% year-on-year, with its growth rate ranking among the top in Hebei Province for two consecutive years, achieving a remarkable transformation from a "steel town" to a "cultural tourism city." This is a microcosm of the resilience inherent in China's economic transformation. Facing the pains of shifting from old to new growth drivers, countless cities are exploring transformation paths based on their own endowments. The dual push of upgrading traditional industries and cultivating emerging sectors has created a complementary, multi-point growth pattern, allowing the Chinese economy to maintain steady progress during its transformation.
The remarkable transformation of Han Dan Avenue further highlights how China's economy uses innovation to break through challenges and continuously enhance its resilience. The success of this cultural-commercial-tourism district is not merely about replicating ancient streets; it stems from activating development vitality through cultural innovation, format innovation, and model innovation. It uses digital technology to bring idiom culture to life, reconstructs tourism consumption scenarios with immersive experiences, and builds a full-chain cultural-commercial-tourism ecosystem through refined operations, perfectly aligning millennia-old cultural heritage with modern consumer demands. This practice of solving development problems through innovation vividly reflects the proactive and pragmatic approach of Han Dan's decision-makers, based on local conditions. It also reveals the core formula for continuously strengthening the resilience of the Chinese economy. From "technological innovation" breaking through key core technologies to "institutional innovation" optimizing the business environment, from "industrial innovation" rebuilding competitive advantages to "model innovation" expanding growth space, this "Four Innovations" model is injecting inexhaustible momentum into the high-quality development of China's economy.
The journey of a single street reflects the transformation of a city and serves as a vivid portrayal of a nation's economic resilience. Currently, while global economic recovery remains sluggish and domestic reform and development tasks are arduous, by steadfastly adhering to the strategy of expanding domestic demand, deepening efforts in transformation and upgrading, and stimulating innovation and creativity, the Chinese economy, with its profound resilience, can undoubtedly navigate economic cycles, maintain steady and long-term progress, and continue to achieve new glories on the path of high-quality development.
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