On November 23^rd, Hu Heping, cultural and tourism minister, met Mahendra Bahadur Pandey, Nepal ambassador to China, to exchange ideas on communication and cooperation in culture and tourism.

    Hu Heping said that China and Nepal were friendly neighbourhood adjacent to each other. In 2019, Xi Jinping and Bidhya Devi Bhandari, presidents of the two countries, visited each other’s nation and the relationship was improved to generations-long comprehensive strategic partnership aiming for development and prosperity. In recent years, China had been Nepal’s second largest customer countries, so cultural and tourism cooperation was significant for our relationship. Not long ago held the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, during which, a systematic plan and a strategic deployment were made for the social and economic development in the “14^th Five Year” plan. It stressed to enhance foreign communication and multi-level communication between civilizations, so new opportunities were offered to improve our cultural and tourism cooperation. China was willing to work with Nepal to implement important consensus reached by heads of two countries so as to push practical cultural and tourism cooperation. The next step was to find a new mode to development cultural relationship against the background of the pandemic control and prevention, and thusly made full use of platforms including China Cultural Center in Nepal and China Tourism Office in Katmandu to enhance both parties’ collaboration under the structure of mechanisms relating to China-South Asia and the “Belt and Road” Initiative.

    Pandey said that China and Nepal had a long history of mutual-trust, mutual-understanding and friendship. Nepal had attached great importance to it’s relationship with China and participated the international cooperation of the “Belt and Road” Initiative. She also spoke highly of China’s responsible attitude to see people’s safety and health as the most important things and of China’s effective measures to resume work and production. Nepal had benefited from China’s development and would continue it’s cultural and tourism communication and cooperation with China in the future, both of which could promote bilateral relationship and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.