Yaks, monks and poetry give zeal to Culture Counts: Two Sessions, One World

Yak rides. Prayer flags. Ethnic dances. The Potala Palace.

What do these have to do with the two sessions?

A lot more than you might think.

Advisers and legislators from Xizang have journeyed from the roof of the world to the country's capital to deliberate on the autonomous region's future. And that includes cultural development.

The two sessions are often hailed as China's largest and most important annual political gathering. But they also have massive cultural consequences because the measures that are developed here will guide the country's cultural progress. This led me to the front lines again this year to discover what this means for China and the world we all share.

I've covered the meetings in some capacity for nearly two decades and since 2017 as a new media journalist at the actual venues.

This year, I wanted to do something a little different.

Countless reporters are, rightly, covering the major economic and diplomatic outcomes. Relatively few international journalists are examining the cultural implications that create human connections that also extend beyond China's physical borders — those things that bring us together as people and peoples.

I've come to understand all too well how the meetings of the country's top legislature and advisory body feature officials being very official and speaking very officially. For good reason, they largely deliver technical reports and jargon-saturated speeches befitting the serious business of guiding governance.

But this makes these terrifically important events dense or even droll for people who aren't policy wonks. And there are only so many visuals that come out of the meetings, so they tend to repeat year after year. I mean, they are meetings. The point is for officials to do official work — not to stage a spectacle.

In previous years, I hosted and developed with colleagues national-award winning video series with hundreds of millions of views about the two sessions using innovative storytelling approaches like my 7-year-old scrawling on a blackboard to explain the sessions in simple terms, a Chinese language-learning program, and paper-cut animations.

This year, I essentially worked as a one-man team on a creative vlog called Culture Counts: Two Sessions, One World. The concept uses visually captivating images, including stop-motion collage clips and actual footage of lamb-snuggling on the "roof of the world", to show how the cultural policies developed at the two sessions shape the ways we eat, play, dress, dance and travel.

In other words, how the serious business of governance translates into how we have fun in daily life.

I slogged through countless statistics and terminology for sparkling snippets, like when Lhasa's mayor Wang Qiang said: "Friends, have you experienced a bicycle race across the Himalayas? Have you joined a half-marathon in Lhasa? Do you want to play a highland winter snooker game? If you'd like, I invite you to Lhasa to join the Linka celebration of the Shoton Festival and have a bowl of tasty highland yogurt."

No, I haven't done those things. And I've been to Lhasa and other destinations in Xizang several times.

This year's two sessions reveal the region is continuing to develop new and innovative cultural travel experiences. Beyond such classic experiences as the Potala and Barkhor, the meetings show Xizang is doing more to offer more to more people from around the region, country and world.

That's worth knowing, for my next trip to Xizang — and yours.

Again, the two sessions are known for policy, not poetry.

But some Jilin officials deployed lyrical prose like, "Cultural travel is a poetic journey to a distant land", and, "Tourists glide on powdery snow through the clouds. They embed their bodies in the mist that envelops towering mountains. They dash through sublime scenery, taking in the blue sky."

These kinds of words evoke images that extend far beyond the two sessions, in every sense.

And they inspire a desire to write our own verses on journeys to lands that seem perhaps not so distant after all.

Wang Ru and Sun Meng contributed to this story.