On November 6, a 54-route culture and tourism tram named "Changchun" departed from Changying Station, becoming a new member of the 54-route culture and tourism tram family after the "Northeast Tiger" service concluded. On the same day, the JD.com Changchun Hongqi Street store officially opened, the first self-operated large store that JD.com has opened in Jilin Province.
A tram and a retail store may seem unrelated, yet they answer the same question: what makes a city persuade people to pause and pay for that pause? The answer lies in two moves: turning memory into a scene, and turning after-sales service into a reason to visit. The common thread is redefining an existing cost item as an attraction.
Turning a ride into an immersive experience
The 54-route tram is the only tram line in Changchun that has been preserved to this day, and it is a city symbol engraved in the memories of generations of Changchun residents. After the earlier retro-themed special tram began operating, it won the affection of countless residents and visitors, with many saying that riding the 54-route culture and tourism tram feels like instantly traveling back in time. This time, the new vehicle is modeled on the old "Changchun" tram hand-built by Changchun tram workers, adding another "rideable city landmark" to Changchun's winter culture and tourism offerings. A means of transport once only responsible for carrying people has now taken on nostalgia and memory. Residents are willing to ride it to revisit old times, and visitors are willing to slow down their trips for this special tram. Once a city's memory can be experienced firsthand and taken away, it shifts from words in an archive into real consumption growth.
Replacing shelves with scenes
The JD.com Changchun Hongqi Street store puts experience ahead of selling goods. It focuses on "choose online, browse offline, experience first and order later," and opens multiple free experience zones: the first-floor 5V5 gaming and esports area allows free team play and hands-on use of a variety of high-spec DIY computers; the second floor offers coffee experiences and a food baking zone, where professional baristas and bakers teach on site; the smart bed experience area can produce a personalized sleep report, and the third-floor washing machine showroom provides free clothing care. The hardest part of buying home appliances has never been comparing prices, but not knowing how to use them at home. JD.com brings installation and instruction into the store, putting service first, which is equivalent to swapping after-sales costs for reasons to enter the store. Pricing power is shifting from products to scenes.
An industry chain inside a small charm
Particularly noteworthy is that the Changchun Gift Shenxiaoxian winter new product series was officially released on the 54-route culture and tourism tram. The new products include Shenxiaoxian ski snowboard and double-board plush magnetic charms, ginseng doll plush toys, intangible cultural heritage crochet hug dolls, and ginseng doll crochet charms that incorporate Northeast regional features such as black soil and birch forests. They reinterpret Jilin Province's local product culture through a younger expression, creating an experience of "viewing city scenery by tram and finding gifts in the carriage." Shenxiaoxian is a ginseng-themed intangible cultural heritage crochet IP jointly created by Jilin Province Aiweilai Cultural and Creative Group and the Jilin Provincial Women's Federation. Relying on the intangible cultural heritage crochet skills of Jilin's skilled women, it has helped more than 3,500 women across the province achieve flexible employment at home and increase income with skillful hands. A small charm is simultaneously culture and tourism content, a consumer product, and a job. The value of an IP is not only in looking good, but in organizing scattered handmade capacity into a supply chain. Turning local specialties into cultural and creative products depends not on design as the threshold, but on organizational capability.
The next step for Chaoyang District
The next step for Changchun's Chaoyang District is clearly stated: continue to deeply tap resource endowments, keep introducing more new experiential consumption formats and projects, seize the ice and snow consumption opportunities of the Winter Universiade, continuously enrich integrated culture, commerce and tourism scenes, further activate the vitality of the business district, and accelerate the building of a urban consumption highland. Old rail lines bring traffic, new stores receive it, and local IP turns "local specialties" into takeaway content. This is the "new playbook" Changchun has explored. In the end, the new playbook is not about placing culture, tourism and commerce side by side, but about turning a city's existing assets, including memory, craftsmanship, local products and events, into scenes that can hold people, drive spending and generate repeat purchases. In the next round of competition among old industrial cities, it is no longer about how many resources a city has, but about its ability to turn resources into consumer appeal.
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