[Photo provided to Chinaculture.org]

The final review meeting for the five Chinese cities vying for the title of the 2022 Culture City of East Asia took place in Beijing on May 10.

The five cities are Taiyuan from Shanxi province, Wenzhou from Zhejiang province, Jinan, Zibo and Yantai from Shandong province.

Chinese vice-minister of culture and tourism Zhang Xu addressed the meeting. According to Zhang, in recent years, the Culture City of East Asia program has been innovating, and important events have been ongoing. Since the 2021 award year, China has selected two cities as Culture City of East Asia annually. This initiative has aroused enthusiasm for applications and improved the overall performance of the Culture City of East Asia program.

Representatives from five candidate cities delivered presentations centering around their cities’ achievements in city construction, cultural system establishment and future development plans. Each city’s presenter also answered questions posed by the expert committee.

The experts who conducted reviews came from various fields, including urban brand construction and urban planning, external cultural exchanges, public cultural services, inheritance and preservation of intangible cultural heritage, protection and utilization of cultural relics, as well as cultural and tourism industries.

At the 12th China-Japan-South Korea Cultural Ministers' Meeting to be held in the future, cultural ministers from the three countries will jointly confer official certificates on the winners.The elected cities will carry out diverse cultural and tourism activities.

As part of a joint activity by China, Japan and South Korea, the East Asia City of Culture program was first proposed by cultural ministers of the three countries during the third ministerial conference in Nara, Japan in January 2011.

Since the program's initial launch in 2012, nine Chinese cities have been designated as Culture Cities of East Asia.