Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in Hainan, biggest international event held this year
April 20, 2021 Category China News Round-up, Weekly
The 2021 Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) opened in Boao, a coastal resort in Hainan province. The theme of the four-day annual conference is “A World in Change: Join Hands to Strengthen Global Governance and Advance Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Cooperation”. Everybody entering the venue needs to have a body temperature check. Those with a body temperature over 37ºC will not be allowed to enter the conference area and will be directly taken away for nucleic acid testing and go through medical treatment or observation. “Despite the pandemic, a total of approximately 2,600 representatives from more than 60 countries and regions, and more than 1,200 journalists from 160 media organizations from 18 countries and regions attend the conference,” BFA Secretary General Li Baodong, told a press conference. “In total, more than 4,000 participants have registered offline for the event – an unprecedented scale – and it is the world’s largest offline conference so far this year,” said Li. Moreover, 40 dignitaries and former dignitaries, 74 former ministers and officials, dozens of senior leaders and envoys in China, representatives of international organizations, and nearly a hundred executives from world-renowned companies, will also attend the meeting via online or offline channels, Li said.
Topics including carbon neutrality, climate change, and the digital economy will top the agenda in the following days. “The fact that we are sitting face-to-face and in crowded places, and yet we know we are safe is an indication that the pandemic can be prevented and managed, which shows strong political will,” Siddharth Chatterjee, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in China, said in a group interview. The BFA released its annual report on the Asian economy saying that under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Asian economies have experienced a sharp drop in growth rates, however, Asian economic performance as a whole has been significantly better than the rest of the world. In terms of purchasing power parity, Asia’s share in the global economic aggregate in 2020 reached 47.3%, up 0.9 percentage points from 2019, the report showed, indicating the increasing role of Asia in the global economy. As Asia’s largest economy, China led Asia with an impressive GDP growth rate of 2.3% last year, the Global Times reports.
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