The award ceremony of the Second Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) Short Video Competition was held in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province on November 20.

The event was co-hosted by China Public Diplomacy Association, the News Center of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) and Global Times Online (www.huanqiu.com).

Besides, diplomats from foreign embassies in China, representatives of China’s award-winning central enterprises and foreign journalists also participated in the event.

Lasting from mid-July to late September, the competition collected more than 500 entries from nearly 80 countries. The entries received more than 300 million views on social media platforms, including nearly 50 million from overseas.

A total of ten awards were given at the ceremony, including the Cultural Communication Ambassador Award, Best Original Video Award, Best Editing Award, Outstanding Contributor Award, Most Popular Video Award, etc. The awards were granted to 65 entries and 2 organizer units.

The competition was actively joined by Chinese enterprises and their employees in Belt and Road countries, who used their cameras to unfold the touching stories of beating COVID-19 together with local people and joining hands with them to share weal and woe, said Wu Hailong, president of China Public Diplomacy Association, calling the competition a concrete action of telling Chinese stories, an example of people-to-people exchanges between China and foreign countries, and also a lively public diplomatic activity.

“I’m glad to see, through the more than 500 entries of the competition, that great stories are happening every day about the Belt and Road construction,” said Zhang Yihao, deputy director of the SASAC News Center, adding that he also saw in the videos the resolution and confidence of the people of the whole world to jointly fight the virus and resume production.

Rong Hanjun, first-level inspector of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Hubei Provincial Committee noted the competition was a hard-won result given the COVID-19 pandemic this year. The award ceremony, held in the heroic city of Wuhan to witness the great stories of the Belt and Road cooperation, bore special significance, she remarked.

Xie Rongbin, deputy editor-in-chief of Global Times, said the competition was a bold attempt of the Global Times Online to tell Chinese stories and build a bridge of international economic and cultural exchanges as a media outlet. “Facts proved that our decision is 100% correct,” he said.