Name: Zhou Zongmin, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Xinhua News Agency

Title: Telling Good Stories Along the Belt and Road, Realizing the Dream of Win-Win Cooperation

Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative is China’s key strategy to advance all-round opening up in the new circumstances; it is moreover the country’s fresh effort to seek win-win cooperation with the rest of the world and build for humankind a community of shared future. The mass media is an essential disseminator and interpreter of the Belt and Road concept, and also promotes and supervises the development of this gargantuan initiative. Similar to the role that convoys and caravans traveling along the ancient Silk Road played centuries ago, the media has much to offer for the construction of a modern Silk Road that connects peoples and facilitates cultural exchanges.

As to playing a constructive role in the Belt and Road Initiative, I have five pieces of advice for Chinese and foreign media: First, be true to facts rather than being disposed to hypotheses, or observations made through rose tinted glasses. Second, adopt dialectic and developmental perspectives, and avoid such mistakes as failing to see the forest for the trees, taking the part as the whole, inflating stories, or winning the battle but losing the war. Third, report from the scene of an event according to personal interviews with people on the ground, so as to discern the true from the false and the right from the wrong. Fourth, follow the principle of wide consultations, joint contributions, and shared benefits. This entails broad participation by media outlets and peoples of the countries along the Belt and Road, in order to boost the reputation of

the initiative. Fifth, innovate means and methods of communication and employ new media and new technologies to better connect China with the bigger world and bring countries throughout the world closer.

Xinhua, China’s state news agency with the widest global geographic reach, reports in multiple languages and runs platforms on which different media converge. It is the national team that tells the world about China’s Belt and Road. This year we launched a campaign among our global stations which has achieved remarkable results. Xinhua is willing and able to share resources with our foreign peers and to join hands in reporting on the Belt and Road, expounding the concept, exhibiting its achievements, and establishing a positive image of the initiative among world audiences.

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