My CIIE Story ? Great Opportunity: Shandong culture goes global through expo

Editor's Note: The fifth China International Import Expo will open in less than a month. In October, several participants of the CIIE will tell their stories themed around "great opportunity" to showcase the positive changes the expo has made to the world and how it has helped build a community with a shared future for mankind over the past five years.

As the manager of a project involving supporting the development of time-honored brands in Shandong province, I have organized many such brands to attend the CIIE over the past few years. The expo has promoted the innovative growth of these companies and Shandong's culture.

At the second CIIE in 2019, a 4,000-square-meter exhibition area for intangible cultural heritage items and Chinese time-honored brands was launched. We set up a booth at the exhibition for the first time and have since been expanding its scale and undertaking more innovations.

We built an ancient Chinese-style booth that looked like the Temple of Confucius and the Dai Temple, two attractions in Shandong, during the third CIIE. A 3-metric-ton stone sculpture, sourced from the Mount Tai, and robot tour guides developed by a Shandong company were also displayed.

In 2021, we designed the Boshan National Cultural Export Base in the Chinese art exhibition style. Four varieties of ceramic artworks, including those with paintings, carvings, and glazes, as well as five colored glass-making techniques including inner painting and thermal forming, were showcased at the base.

Shandong was also the first province that established a permanent pavilion for time-honored and intangible cultural heritage-related companies in the CIIE. Based on the pavilion, we have rolled out a series of measures to explore markets in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta region.

A provincial-level inheritor of peach wood carving, an intangible cultural heritage, said the CIIE has significantly bolstered local industrial growth. Peach wood processing has become a major industry in Feicheng, a county-level city in Tai'an, Shandong, where the inheritor's shop is located. More than 10,000 people are working in the industry and over 70 percent of the products are sold in overseas markets.

Yefengsu, another time-honored brand that specializes in making Shandong specialties such as pancakes, signed a 5 million yuan ($696,064.9) deal with a subsidiary of Lagardere Group at the second CIIE. The company has since expanded into South Korea and Japan.

Many companies told me they would have brought more products to the expo if they knew there are so many business opportunities available.

Shandong's achievements at the CIIE have attracted a great deal of attention from media. During the fourth edition alone, more than 100 news stories about our time-honored brands were published and viewed by 60 million people. According to the Report on Media Coverage and Influence of the Fourth CIIE, the time-honored brand exhibition held by Shandong was the second most trending topic among all the expo's cultural activities in China.