OREANDA-NEWS. December 2, 2011. In the near future, residents in Hefei, capital city of Anhui province will be blessed with various ways of spending their leisure time in the city proper, according to a modern service industry meeting on Wednesday.

They can travel to the Chaohu Lake area known for its spring, lake, mountain and town, enjoy the beautiful lake view of the Binhu New District on a luxurious liner, or make a self-driving tour on the Huanhu Avenue. Also, some under-construction facilities in the old town like a tourism complex and a high-tech amusement center are expected to offer local people more recreation options.

"One of the knottiest problems we are facing is that the development of the modern service sector cannot meet public demands. A lack of leisure facilities has pushed local residents out of the city enjoying themselves on weekends, " Wu Cunrong, secretary of Hefei Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) said at the meeting.

A number of tourism and modern service projects were made public at the meeting. According to the municipal bureau of commerce, there are as many as 22 modern service clusters in Hefei, including two clusters of tourist attractions respectively in Lujiang and Bantang of Chaohu and a logistic center in Chaohu, which made the cut when Chaohu was changed from a prefecture-level city to a county-level city under Hefei earlier this year.

The municipal government aims to nurture the city into an international tourist destination welcoming 70 million visitors from home and abroad and earning 70 billion yuan in tourism revenue by 2015.

A tourist industrial zone will be built around the Chaohu Lake, one of China's five largest freshwater lakes located at the juncture of Chaohu and the capital city, authorities said. The lake area boasts a thermal spring, wetland and historical and cultural resources.