For the record, BRI has stimulated colossal infrastructure investments worth trillions of dollars across Asia, Europe and Africa.

China, being the world’s second-largest economy and the largest trading country, is the key trading partner for numerous countries.

While many would associate the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with greater infrastructure connectivity among participating countries, promoting financial cooperation and enhancing capital flows are also objectives of the BRI in a bid to establish a transnational platform in order to deepen economic cooperation and financial integration.

CULTURE embodies the way of life of a society. From language, knowledge, customs and beliefs to ideas, skills, arts and crafts, culture is how a society organises itself. Heritage is an aspect of culture that is transmitted from generation to generation. According to the Unesco Convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, “tangible cultural heritage” includes artistic creations, built heritage such as buildings and monuments and other physical or tangible products of human creativity that are invested with cultural significance in a society. Meanwhile, “intangible cultural heritage” indicates “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage” (Unesco, 2003).