THE Belt and Road (BRI) Media Co-operation forum, with 200 participating journalists from 71 countries, is one of the world’s biggest — but then, international media co-operation is not much esteemed in the West.

Britain’s monopoly media in particular is very insular, with serious analysis of politics in even close neighbouring countries like France or Germany largely confined — with the Morning Star excepted — to specialist publications like the Financial Times. The glaring exception is the United States, whose politics can make our front pages and dominate BBC home pages for days at a time.

We’ve seen this lately in response to the assassination of far-right agitator Charlie Kirk: a saga which, in its victim’s politics, its backdrop of an increasingly intolerant, nationalistic and authoritarian United States and its violent climax could hardly paint a more nightmarish picture of the world’s most powerful country — which seems intent on dragging us all down with it.

The contrast with the optimism and openness on display at the BRI conference, which opened on Tuesday in Kunming, capital of China’s tropical Yunnan province, was stark.

Here was the diametric opposite of Trumpism: a summit championing the need to share ideas, science and technology rather than cutting off access to maintain national hegemony; one promoting green tech and ecological concerns when an increasingly nihilistic “drill, baby drill” climate change denialism is taking root in Britain as well as the US; one celebrating internationalism and cultural exchange instead of supremacism, aggression and hostility to outsiders.

That included direct and very personal tributes to the cultural value of immigration and “people-to-people bonds” — something we could do with a bit more of in Britain, given the far right’s domination of the narrative on that subject.

A French baker who married a local and settled in Kunming wasn’t “stealing our women” — he was lauded as having become a “son-in-law of Yunnan” in a speech by the province’s Communist Party secretary Wang Ning, a living example of bringing cultures together. “Six million international visitors came to us last year,” he added. “Many choose to stay and make a life here, just like Vincent.”

Later in the programme we heard from Dong Quang Vinh, conductor of the Vietnam National Opera and Ballet, and his Chinese composer wife Mo Shuangshuang, who spoke of how they had combined skills to produce music influenced by both countries’ traditions (and performed), and French photographer and singer Anais Martane, who detailed her work translating French songs and plays into Chinese and vice versa together with her Chinese husband.

This was an unashamed appeal to love crossing borders and civilisations cross-fertilising as a result — it was movingly done, and it is hard to imagine a similar message being blessed by top politicians and representatives of the country’s biggest media organisations back in Britain.

Nor, amid the snatches of traditional song, dance and showcased paintings, the repeated references to China’s historic role in establishing the Silk Road and the maritime voyages of 15th century admiral Zheng He, and the confident promotion of modern concepts like President Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative, could anyone imagine that this made the hosts less proud to be Chinese.

Zheng He’s famous voyages, which reached as far as the east coast of Africa, took place nearly a century before Portuguese explorers kicked off Europe’s navigation of the world’s oceans and contrasted to Europe’s in that conquest was never on the agenda.

The history of the period is complex — had later Ming emperors tried to build on his missions rather than abandon them as unprofitable, history might have unfolded differently. Nonetheless, the contrast is powerful and sends exactly the message China now broadcasts through the BRI — we are not like the West. We are not here to rob you.

The huge, mainly global South audience of journalists from across Asia, Africa and Latin America showed it is well received. No wonder, since the first day of the conference was heavy on practical detail as well as romantic aspiration.

How joint projects on organic rice cultivation had hugely increased yields — and farmers’ incomes — from Gambia to Bali in Indonesia, with testimony from farmers direct. Doctors taking the stage to report their work on medical missions, echoing those of fellow socialist state Cuba, to remove cataracts in Sri Lanka or treat congenital heart disease in children in Cambodia.

We heard about solar power installations in central Asia and the Middle East, electric car factories set up in Thailand, ports, railroads and motorways built across the global South — from people who worked on them; and, to quote Science and Technology Daily editor Wang Junming using an old analogy, the approach is to “teach fishing rather than offer a fish” — training up workers in partner countries so the result is development, not the systematic underdevelopment and artificially reproduced poverty that is the legacy of Western colonialism and neocolonialism the world over.

Those saluting the local results included delegates from Peru, Gambia, Ghana, Brazil and South Africa; and all echoed the message that the BRI is about partnership, not hierarchies.

“We do not ask for China’s sympathy,” Ghana Broadcasting Corporation’s Amin Alhassan said, after reflecting on the problematic results of the country’s decades of looking to the West. “We ask for solidarity.”

He was scathing about the approach of most Western-based media, saying it continued to operate on the assumption that we lived in a unipolar world centred on the United States when the global South has already moved on.

Chen Jianwen — editor in chief of People’s Daily, the biggest circulation newspaper in the world and co-host of the conference with the Yunnanese provincial government and Communist Party — had similar criticisms when I met him at the welcome reception for foreign guests the previous evening, greeting me warmly but immediately complaining that coverage of China in the British media was misleading and unfair. I could only agree, and say we at the Morning Star do what we can to correct the record.

In his keynote address on Tuesday morning, Chen said the principle at the heart of the BRI was that it “follows the will of the people, meets the aspirations of the people, and wins the hearts of the people.” It supplanted the World Bank and IMF as the largest lender of development finance globally as long ago as 2017, and the concrete results of its projects are the polar opposite of the austerity packages and deregulating “reforms” they demand.

“Tell compelling Silk Road stories!” Zheng Jianbang, the vice-chair of the standing committee of the National People’s Congress and the most senior politician to address the opening session, urged his multinational audience, calling on the world’s media to seek truth from facts on the ground in their home countries about a global project that is reshaping international relations.

And we should, rather than defaulting to the sneering cynicism common to most British media treatment of any attempt to change the rules the West has imposed on the world for too long.

In each contribution was an optimism that life can and will get better, that crises like climate change can be addressed, not avoided, and that peoples from every corner of the world can respect and appreciate each other. What a contrast to the sorry state of British politics right now.

The world is changing. The scarcity of journalists from Western countries at a conference packed with those from the “Third World” shows how few realise quite how quickly.