Carmaker gets creative to support development in local communities

BMW Brilliance Automotive launched the 2020 BMW China Culture Journey's Intangible Cultural Heritage Exhibition on Friday in Shenyang, Northeast China's Liaoning province, as part of the automaker's efforts to contribute to local communities and cultural tourism industry development.

Running from Friday to Saturday at the Shenyang Palace Museum, the exhibition displayed 20 different types of local intangible cultural heritage products, to help promote the province's intangible cultural heritage protection and the revitalization and development of its cultural tourism industry.

The automaker believes that for a company to grow from "good" to "great", it must look beyond sales performance and profitability, and see economic outcomes and social deeds as equally important. A great company should also be a responsible one, engaging with society and creating shared value, according to BMW Brilliance Automotive, a joint venture between German auto giant BMW and Chinese automaker Brilliance.

BMW China Culture Journey, a long-standing public welfare program initiated by the joint venture in 2007, demonstrates the automaker's strong commitment to local communities and to supporting social and economic development with cultural tourism.

In September, BMW Brilliance launched a four-day 2020 BMW China Culture Journey visit to Liaoning, with the aim of shoring up the province's cultural tourism with innovative measures.

Including the cities of Shenyang, Panjin, Chaoyang and Fuxin, the visit allowed attendees to experience Liaoning's Manchu, Liaohekou and Hongshan cultures. Also, its tangible and intangible cultural heritages, including the Shenyang Palace Museum, Niuheliang Archaeological Site, Manchu folk embroidery and Fuxin agate carving.

Joining hands with the Chinese tourism website Mafengwo, the 2020 BMW China Culture Journey released a tour guide about Liaoning.

It aims to promote the province's intangible culture heritages and their inheritors to more people, especially younger ones.

To empower intangible cultural heritage inheritors, the 2020 BMW China Culture Journey has partnered with an Alibaba Foundation public welfare program that helps women.

Through the program, female inheritors will learn e-commerce training and skills. The program is expected to help promote the sustainable development of intangible cultural heritage inheritance and protection.

The BMW China Culture Journey's Intangible Cultural Heritage Exhibition also staged cultural and creative products developed by the Tsinghua BMW Innovation Center for Intangible Cultural Heritage Safeguarding in 2019.

Collaborating with the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University, BMW established the innovation center in 2016, in an attempt to empower inheritors of intangible cultural heritages with professional guidance.

The cultural and creative products at the exhibition demonstrated a successful integration of intangible cultural heritages into modern life and promoted the creative transformation of traditional Chinese culture, according to the automaker.

During the 2020 BMW China Culture Journey's visit to Liaoning, BMW Brilliance selected four intangible cultural heritage inheritors from Liaoning and two inheritors from Hubei (to show support for those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic) to study at the Tsinghua BMW Innovation Center for Intangible Cultural Heritage Safeguarding.

The creative products of the six inheritors are expected to be unveiled in 2021, according to the joint venture.