BEIJING: Dinh Thuy Dung, a bilingual Vietnamese broadcaster, owes her career to the influence of Chinese culture. The young woman, who hails from a small Vietnamese village, said she learned Chinese because of a pop song.
“It was the first time I felt the charm of the Chinese language, and it sparked my desire to learn Chinese,” she said on Tuesday while addressing the audience at the South and Southeast Asian Media Network Annual Meeting 2026 in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province.
“After choosing to learn Chinese, I was able to participate in exchange programs and travel. … I became a Vietnamese-Chinese bilingual broadcaster.”
At work, Dung found a purpose larger than herself. “I could introduce Vietnam’s culture, landscape and people to Chinese audiences,” she said. “At the same time, I could bring China’s culture and stories back to my Vietnamese friends.”
Her career embodies the very cooperation that media professionals from across South and Southeast Asia have gathered at the Kunming meeting to advance.
Representatives of more than 170 media outlets, news organizations and think tanks from the region attended the annual meeting of the network that was launched in 2024.
The network was initiated by the Yunnan International Communication Center for South and Southeast Asia and China Daily Asia Pacific.
Zeng Yan, head of the publicity department of the Yunnan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, said that amid accelerating global changes and rising uncertainties, China remains committed to building a community with a shared future for humanity and contributing Chinese wisdom and solutions to address global challenges and advance a more just and reasonable international order.
She highlighted the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative proposed by President Xi Jinping, saying that they provide guidance for responding to global challenges and promoting international cooperation.
Zeng noted that over the past three years, the regional media network had expanded its membership, improved its mechanisms, established a liaison office, released annual work plans and promoted practical cooperation.
She said that Yunnan is closely connected with South and Southeast Asian countries by geography, people-to-people ties and shared cultural links, creating many stories worth telling and sharing.
She called for cooperation in artificial intelligence-assisted news production, multilingual intelligent translation, cross-platform distribution, short-video production and data journalism, so that authentic, diverse and warm regional content could be produced more efficiently and have more precise reach and broader dissemination. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
