Senior official urges deep integration of culture and finance in Guangdong

South China's Guangdong province will further promote the deep integration of culture and finance to boost the prosperity and development of the cultural industry, a senior official said.

The cultural industry is a prominent advantage for Guangdong and an important support to the province's high-quality development and high-level opening up.

Chen Xiaojian, deputy head of the Publicity Department of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, made his remarks at the opening ceremony of the 2023 Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Cultural Industry Investment Conference in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, on Tuesday. The two-day event aims to promote cultural development in the GBA.

According to Chen, Guangdong will accelerate the development of six key industries, including advanced cultural manufacturing, creative design, digital creativity, news and information services, film and television and publishing and printing to help build a cultural province in the following years.

"Meanwhile the province will annually construct a number of key cultural projects with Lingnan characteristics to leverage social investment of more than 100 billion yuan ($14.29 billion), empowering culture with finance to achieve the high-quality development of a culturally strong province," he said.

Chen urged investors and business representatives from around the world to seize the opportunities to invest in the cultural industry in the GBA which has great potential for development in the coming years.

"Investing in the cultural industry in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area will come back with fruitful results," he said.

"The cultural industry is one of the pillar industries in Guangdong, with a huge scale. The province's added value of the cultural industry has led the country for 19 consecutive years," he added.

According to official statistics, Guangdong's cultural industrial output value can now represent four to five percent of the province's GDP.

In 2021, cultural enterprise above a designated size in the nine Guangdong cities in the GBA reached a revenue of 1.99 trillion yuan in 2021. Guangdong, a global production base, has registered 9,396 cultural enterprises above the designated size, with most of them located in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan.