China's top winter tourism destination to host ice-and-snow sports Super League

HARBIN, Nov. 28 (Xinhua) -- Heilongjiang Province in northeast China will host the inaugural Heilongjiang ice-and-snow sports Super League, the Heilongjiang Provincial Sports Bureau revealed at a press conference on Thursday.

Featuring 100 exciting events including skiing, skating and snowball-fights, the Super League will take place amid the region's upcoming winter tourism boom.

According to Wang Xianyu, director of the bureau, the competition will run from December 2025 to March 2026 -- with its focus primarily on mass participation sports. Wang also noted that preparations for the Super League were progressing in an orderly manner.

In addition to professional speed skating and snow rugby competitions involving international participants, it will also include popular, fun-oriented events such as a snow football challenge and a snowball-fight tournament.

Wang said the Super League will utilize distinctive tourism resources across the province to launch city culture festivals, travel-photography contests and other activities around major competition venues -- thus creating an immersive ice-and-snow tourism experience combining athletic excitement, leisure travel and specialty consumption.

"Super League competition participants will be granted a cultural-tourism pass for special activities such as 'Skating with Champions' courses and world champion gold medal exhibitions held in our city," said Zhang Yueyang, vice mayor of the city of Qitaihe in Heilongjiang.

As home of multiple Winter Olympic and world champions, including Yang Yang, Wang Meng, Sun Linlin and Fan Kexin, this city is expecting a surge in visitors this winter, following Super League events to experience its winter sports culture, Zhang said.

Boasting a range of landmark winter attractions, Heilongjiang is mustering its unique ice-and-snow resources to generate new economic momentum.

Notably, the market size of the ice-and-snow economy in this province had reached 266.17 billion yuan (about 37.6 billion U.S. dollars) in 2024, of which ice-and-snow tourism contributed 182.33 billion yuan, said the provincial bureau of statistics.

Wang added that the ice-and-snow sports Super League aims to harness the sports fever sparked both by the 2025 Harbin Asian Winter Games and the Village Super League, a grassroots football tournament held in southwest China since 2023, to further energize the province's ice-and-snow economy.

Launched in Rongjiang County, Guizhou Province, the Village Super League attracted over 9.4 million tourists in 2024 and became one of China's most prominent grassroots football competitions -- heralding a surge in grassroots sports events and spectator tourism in places such as east China's Jiangsu Province, Beijing Municipality in the north and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China's northwest. ■