China will strengthen the supply of small-scale tourism land, including elevated walkways and plank roads, while exploring combined resource offerings that bundle land, forests, and other natural assets, as part of a broader push to boost the tourism industry's "spatial supply" and foster high-quality development.

The Ministry of Natural Resources held a press briefing on September 15 to outline the new "Guidance on Optimizing Natural Resource Allocation to Promote the Orderly and High-Quality Development of Tourism," jointly issued with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.

The guidance introduces incremental policies across several key areas, such as refining spatial layout, improving use controls, innovating land supply models, revitalizing underutilized land, and enhancing service supervision. These measures aim to safeguard the standardized, high-quality advancement of the tourism sector while unlocking fresh potential in domestic demand.

On the front of spatial supply, the policies work to align resource allocation with industry development. Under the precondition of respecting baseline controls for ecological and agricultural zones ("three zones and three lines"), the spatial needs of tourism development during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period will be integrated into the unified national land spatial planning map. Detailed plans for scenic and historic areas will also be incorporated into the territorial planning framework, with support for co-compiling these alongside regional detailed plans.

The guidance specifically addresses challenges small tourism projects face in securing land. For public utility sites such as gas stations, service areas, and rest stops that are scattered far from urban centers due to tourism needs, separate urban construction land parcels may now be allocated outside current urban development boundaries. Meanwhile, small-scale tourism support facilities 鈥?including management offices, eco-friendly restrooms, elevated walkways, and plank roads 鈥?as well as suburban parks and scenic areas that do not alter original land use classification, can be managed under their existing land category and tracked through the unified planning map for oversight.

Encouraging the use of existing land inventories, the guidance also promotes innovative mechanisms for supplying natural resources. Within the scope of territorial spatial planning, projects that require integrating two or more categories of natural assets, such as land, minerals, marine resources, or forests, may explore bundling these into a combined resource package. Once the necessary supply conditions are met, the package can be offered in a single transaction and operated as a whole.

The guidance underscores strict adherence to territorial spatial plans in determining land use. It explicitly prohibits any unauthorized alteration of current land status or planned uses under the pretext of tourism projects, specifically banning construction tied to villas, private estates, real estate developments, golf courses, theme parks, replica ancient towns, or landscape-style imitation heritage buildings.