Boosting city development with a robust convention & exhibition industry - Suzhou International Expo Centre writes a new chapter in high-quality development

Recently, a delegation from Suzhou International Expo Centre (SuzhouExpo) attended the 18th China Convention & Exhibition Brand Development Conference in Beijing. While exploring new pathways for the high-quality development of the convention and exhibition industry, SuzhouExpo achieved two major milestones. Chief among them was a landmark collaboration: the official announcement to establish and operate the China Convention & Exhibition Brand Project Incubation Base at SuzhouExpo. As the first demonstration base of its kind in southern China, it fills a regional gap in convention and exhibition brand incubation while offering pioneering experience and setting a benchmark for the high-quality development of Suzhou's exhibition industry and even the country as a whole, underscoring Suzhou's important position in China's industrial landscape.

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Located on the shores of Jinji Lake, SuzhouExpo is more than a landmark building; it is a powerful engine driving urban development. As a super-platform with a nationwide reach that connects global industries with local opportunities, SuzhouExpo advances economic quality improvement and industrial upgrading through a series of high-level, professional, and international events. By unlocking the added value of cultural dissemination, it injects sustained momentum into Suzhou's industrial innovation, economic growth, and brand building. SuzhouExpo has become a key hub energizing regional development and stands as a vivid example of Suzhou's humanistic economic development in practice.

GT SHOW: The rise of a homegrown IP, forging a dual engine of industry and consumption

The leapfrog growth of GT SHOW-from local cultivation to China's No. 1 and the world's fourth-largest professional modified-vehicle show-offers a vivid example of how SuzhouExpo empowers industrial upgrading and consumption growth through exhibitions. In 2025, the three-day automotive culture extravaganza delivered striking results: 187,000 visits, with more than 92.5 percent of attendees coming from outside Suzhou; nearly 850 million yuan in direct consumption driven; and over 1 billion online impressions, cementing its status as a phenomenal exhibition IP.

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In terms of economic impact, conventions and exhibitions not only energized related local industries such as hotels, catering, and transportation, but also created a synergistic model of "exhibition viewing + tourism + consumption." Large numbers of out-of-town car enthusiasts traveled specifically to Suzhou, significantly boosting foot traffic in surrounding commercial districts and cultural tourism sites. From an industrial empowerment perspective, GT SHOW brought together nearly 1,000 modified vehicles and close to 100 industrial chain enterprises from more than 20 countries and regions, spanning the full value chain from modification parts to automotive culture peripherals. It created a high-energy platform for technical exchange and resource matching in Suzhou's automotive aftermarket, promoted alignment between local manufacturing and creative industries and global cutting-edge concepts, and fostered the clustered development of Suzhou's automotive culture industry. In terms of brand empowerment, the exhibition's trendy, youth-oriented appeal turned it into a hotspot for online influencers. Through short videos and livestreams, "Suzhou Intelligent Manufacturing" and "Suzhou Trends" reached a national audience via automotive culture, significantly enhancing the city's visibility and appeal among younger demographics.

EMNLP 2025: A global top-tier conference enabling upgrading in industry and cultural tourism

The successful hosting of EMNLP 2025 (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), a top-tier academic conference under the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), demonstrated SuzhouExpo's comprehensive capability to host high-end global conferences and delivered dual breakthroughs in industrial empowerment and cultural tourism. Held from Nov. 4 to 9, the conference attracted more than 6,000 experts, scholars, industry representatives, and young researchers from around the world to Suzhou.

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In terms of industrial empowerment, the conference focused on cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Industry leaders including Apple, Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba Cloud, and other innovative frontier companies participated, sharing the latest developments through technical presentations and salon-style exchanges. Major companies also set up "secondary spaces" in hotels around the venue, hosting talent recruitment dinners and technology-matching meetings for in-depth engagement with global young talent. Several leading scholars explicitly expressed interest in developing their careers and settling in Suzhou, signaling a potential inflow of high-quality talent into the city's digital economy. The conference significantly raised Suzhou's academic visibility and industrial profile in the global AI community, accelerating the clustering of innovation resources and the marketization of research.

In city brand communication, SuzhouExpo's meticulous planning was evident throughout. From opening performances featuring local highlights such as excerpts of Suzhou opera, to hands-on experiences of intangible cultural heritage including Suzhou embroidery and seed carving, to the promotion of Suzhou-style cuisine designed through a catering system accommodating diverse needs, the conference embedded the city's cultural identity at every touchpoint. Themed routes such as "Half-Day Leisure," "One-Day Retreat," and "Endless Night," combined with convenient transportation, rich cultural and tourism resources, and a cityscape where the classical and the modern coexist, left a strong impression on participants. Many interviewees noted that Suzhou not only has the professional capacity to host world-class international conferences but also offers an urban charm that encourages people to stay, indirectly driving growth in local cultural tourism and consumption.

Suzhou Creative & Design Cultural Industry Expo: Cultivating creative ips and building a platform for industry-culture symbiosis

The 14th Suzhou Creative & Design Cultural Industry Expo, guided by the concept of "industry as the core, culture as the wings," achieved both quality upgrading and efficiency breakthroughs in SuzhouExpo's self-organized exhibitions. It has become an important vehicle for energizing the cultural industry and unlocking cultural added value. The expo attracted more than 500 exhibitors from 42 countries and regions and welcomed over 100,000 visitors, setting new records for scale and influence. At the concurrent 2025 Suzhou International Culture and Creativity Conference, high-profile guests including John Howkins, "father of the creative economy" from the UK, and Liu Peng, general manager of China Animation Comic Game Group, attended, underscoring Suzhou's commitment to attracting global cultural IPs and supporting the global reach of its own cultural strengths.

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From an industrial empowerment perspective, the expo spanned the entire cultural and creative industry chain, with dedicated sections covering museums and creative products, digital creativity, and innovation in intangible cultural heritage. It built an integrated platform combining "exhibition + transaction + investment promotion." On-site sales of creative products exceeded 7.1 million yuan, and more than 20,000 intended cooperation projects and orders were reached. Popular items such as the Sanxingdui Bronze Bird plush toy and the Suzhou IP doll "Fu Gui'er" performed strongly. Intangible cultural heritage skills, including Suzhou embroidery and seed carving, entered everyday life through creative products, effectively advancing the deep integration of the cultural industry with the real economy. The expo also brought together leading domestic and international enterprises alongside emerging players in the cultural and creative sector, facilitating technical exchange, business model innovation, and resource matching, and helping steer Suzhou's cultural and creative industry toward higher-end and international markets. In addition, themed activities such as the launch of the public brand "Suzhou Gift" and the Crab Climbing Championship allowed residents and visitors alike to experience Suzhou's cultural charm up close, enriching urban cultural life and further enhancing the city's cultural soft power through word-of-mouth engagement.

In recent years, SuzhouExpo has actively built a diversified convention and exhibition ecosystem spanning industry, consumption, culture, and related fields. In 2025, 60 percent of its hosted projects were aligned with Suzhou's "1030" industry system. It successfully attracted a number of high-standard industrial exhibitions, including the China Innovative Pharmaceutical Medical Conference and the CLNB New Energy Industry Chain Expo, and supported the leapfrog growth of key projects such as the EBC Biotech Industry Conference and Exhibition.

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Upholding the Suzhou Cultural Investment and Development Group's philosophy of "adding a touch of Suzhou flavor to happiness," SuzhouExpo has maintained its role as both a practitioner of city strategy and a builder of industry ecosystems. By using exhibitions as a connective link, it deeply integrates industrial resources, talent capital, and consumer markets. Looking ahead, SuzhouExpo will seize the opportunities created by the development of the China Convention & Exhibition Brand Project Incubation Base to further strengthen the value chain, enhance the cultivation of independent IPs and the attraction of high-end projects, and deepen the construction of an "exhibition + industry + investment + consumption" ecosystem. Through professional empowerment of industrial upgrading, global resource aggregation via its platform, and service-driven delivery of urban warmth, SuzhouExpo aims to establish itself as an industry benchmark rooted in China with a global presence, making a strong contribution to Suzhou's ambition to build an industrial innovation highland with greater international influence.
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