An aerial view of the Xiamen Free Trade Zone. [Photo/WeChat account of Xiamen FTZ]
In recent years, Xiamen has been promoting the high-quality development of foreign cultural trade, employing multiple measures to facilitate cultural products and services to go global.
In 2023, the city's cultural trade was valued at 19.1 billion yuan ($266 million), an 89.3 percent increase year-on-year.
Xiamen Mechanist Games is a national cultural export base enterprise. Earlier this year, their newly developed online game, after just over a month of trial promotion in Russia, ranked third in the download charts.
The company also shot a short film of the same name overseas as a means of promotion.
These innovations in content and dissemination are part of the company's efforts to seize upon the rapid development phase of "breaking through domestic boundaries with Chinese culture", thereby increasing research and development investment. In 2023, the company achieved a performance growth of over 20 percent in overseas markets.
The faster and more stable pace of the company's "going global" initiative is backed by a range of supportive policies aimed at enterprises, including those provided by the Xiamen Free Trade Zone. These include awards for national key cultural export enterprises, one-time incentives for projects, and incentives for increasing cultural exports.
Since being designated as a national cultural export base in 2018, the Xiamen FTZ has seen the addition of 2,099 new cultural enterprises. By the end of last year, a total of 2,780 cultural enterprises had been registered there, marking the beginnings of an industry cluster.