Hello, and welcome to this edition of  Africa Express here on China Radio International. I'm your host, Wei Tong. 

Today we'll continue to talk to Solomon Ali, a senior official from Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ethiopia. He stayed in China for around two weeks for an African Cultural Visitors Program, initiated by China's Ministry of Culture.

Chinese and African officials have exchanged ideas on mapping out policies to preserve historic sites in danger of extinction and promote cultural diversity. They have discussed how China and Africa can cooperate in achieving these goals. I started dialogue with him about his impression on the trip to three places in China.

(Q&A, dialogue with Solomon, part-2)

Many westerners have advocated Africa to maintain its indigenous culture, to some extent, to ensure income from tourism. Indeed, some villages can attract many tourists each year but the tribes still remain underdeveloped. So what is Solomon's view on it, preserving aboriginal culture at the risk of slowing down or even halting local economic development? Is it a selfish idea? Here is Solomon again.

(in English, Solomon-preserving indigenous culture)

"Africa, especially Ethiopia has many nations or nationalities who speak different kinds of languages, who have preserved various cultural heritages, way of life. And we also know that most of these societies live in a situation where development opportunities are not provided to them for long period of time. Cultural changes of those ancient habits and traditions take much more time so Ethiopia adopts a transformative cultural policy. We preserve the most important aspects of culture of our society while we gradually get rid of the harmful traditions and practices that are going on in our country."

Now we conclude this edition of  Africa Express . If you would like to listen to this or other stories again, please log onto our website at www.crienglish.com. I am Wei Tong. Hope you can tune into our program next time! Bye for now!