Diplomats impressed with ecological progress in China's mountainous Guizhou

When visiting the Baling River Bridge among mountains and lush greeneries in southwest China's Guizhou Province, Cyprus' ambassador to China, Martha Mavrommati, gave high praise to the harmony between local technological development and environment protection.

Mavrommati is on a tour in Guizhou joined by more than 20 ambassadors and diplomats from 19 countries, including Fiji, Colombia, and Cyprus, from June 3 to 7. The theme of the tour is on local ecological civilization progress.

Guizhou, once a province with rocky desertification land in China, had suffered from ecological degradation and severe economic distress.

However, years of efforts to better restore and preserve the local ecosystem have paid off, and the province has been designated as China's ecological civilization pilot zone and the country's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone.

The over 2,200-meter-long Baling River Bridge is about 370 meters above the water's surface. The bridge used to be a steel truss girder suspension bridge with the longest span in China when it was built and opened to traffic in 2009.

At that time, the bridge helped reduce the travel time across the gorge from one hour to merely a few minutes. Now, a museum on bridge construction techniques and relevant technologies has been built nearby, becoming a hotspot for tourism in Guizhou.

The diplomats visited the museum and joined the local elementary school students' extra-curriculum activities, learning about the bridge construction achievements of Guizhou.

"I'm really impressed by the little girls I worked with, how they have imaginations that one day they want to be engineers and build a very big bridge," said Mavrommati.

Guizhou, with 92.5 percent of its land covered by mountains and hills, has built nearly 30,000 bridges since the late 1970s and is now home to nearly half of the world's 100 tallest bridges.

"Guizhou is a mountainous province and bridges are very important. The province respects people and makes their lives easier," she added.

In recent years, Guizhou has been promoting the big data industry as a backbone of its high-quality economic development while protecting the ecological environment.

At the province's big data exhibition center in its capital city of Guiyang, the latest digital achievements on display have caught the attention of the diplomats.

As a region with many ultra-large data centers, Guizhou has witnessed its digital economy maintaining the highest growth rate in China for seven consecutive years.

In 2019, the provincial big data development administration bureau signed a memorandum of cooperation with Morocco's digital development agency, promoting cooperation and exchanges in cloud computing, information security, e-government platform construction, and so on.

The trip is the first time for Reda Oudghiri Idrissi, minister counselor of the Embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco in China, to visit Guizhou.

After seeing several heavyweight enterprises in the big data sector, including Tencent and Alibaba, attracted to the province, Idrissi praised an online freight service platform that helps connect truck drivers, shippers as well as goods owners and allows each side to get real-time information.

The platform helps improve the efficiency of the transportation system and reduce vehicle energy consumption and carbon emissions, he said.

"The province has become a hub in digital data industries and I believe it will be a pioneer in digital transformation in China," Idrissi added.

According to Idrissi, Morocco has also encouraged digitalization in various sectors, promoting digital tools and their use among institutions and citizens.

"China is promoting digital construction in all aspects. We look forward to further bilateral exchanges and cooperation in e-government construction, agriculture, and e-commerce," the diplomat said.