Other members of Anping's Municipal Party Committee leadership shared Zhou Yi's view.
Mayor Li Yang, Executive Vice Mayor Yan Xiangyu, and the others all believed that their local winter tourism offerings had no particular advantage over those in Liaoyang or the neighboring province.
They therefore had no hope of winter tourism becoming as wildly popular as summer tourism. Frankly, they would have been quietly delighted with even half the summer's visitor numbers.
Yet to everyone's surprise, from late December through New Year's Day and the Spring Festival, and indeed throughout the entire winter, Anping's winter tourism proved every bit as popular as its summer tourism, if not more so.
Acclaimed director Feng Baozhen contacted the Yunyi Group early on, volunteering to make a winter tourism promotional film for Anping City.
Once again, a top-tier production team was assembled, with a host of artists and celebrities taking part in the shoot.
As soon as the promotional film was released, it brought another enormous wave of attention and online traffic to Anping. More than a hundred celebrities posted recommendations on Weibo, creating an even bigger stir than the summer campaign.
Publicly available data showed that rail passenger departures from Anping City's stations, including East Station and North Station, broke historical records for an entire week, totaling more than two hundred thousand passenger journeys-over fifty thousand more than during the comparable summer period.
Visitors no longer came only from Eastern Guangdong and Jiangnan. As tourists poured in from every corner of the country, Anping's restaurants, barbecue joints, and snack shops had to open early. On the downtown food street in particular, visitors lined up outside many establishments, yet seats remained almost impossible to find.
Fine snowflakes drifted through the sky as tourists strolled along the bustling street, holding either a skewer of candied