Building cultural bridges

Robotic moment: Dr Wee (third left) and MCA secretary-general Datuk Chong Sin Woon (fourth left) checking out a robot that mimics human expressions with other media delegates at the National and Local Co-built Embodied Artificial Intelligence Robotics Innovation Centre in Beijing. — Photos by ALLISON LAI/The Star

IN the words of the late Pope Francis: “All wars, all struggles, all problems that are not resolved, with which we face, are due to a lack of dialogue.” Similarly, China’s founding figures Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping urged their people to “Seek truth from facts (shi shi qiu shi).”

These insights encapsulate a recent media delegation’s visit to China, where journalists from 12 Asian and African nations engaged in a ministerial dialogue on global civilisation.