(17 September 2015) Today, John Whittingdale, Ed Vaizey and Tracey Crouch met with their Chinese counterparts in Greenwich to discuss ways both countries could cooperate on tourism, fashion, sport and libraries. This set of meetings is called the People to People Dialogue (P2P).
The P2P was co-chaired by Vice Premier Liu Yandong, for China, and Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt for the UK. The first P2P Dialogue was hosted by the UK in 2012, and the second took place in Beijing in 2014.
During the P2P, DCMS Ministers signed several MoUs with the Chinese Government including one relating to libraries. It states that The National Library of China and the British Library have identified multiple areas of potential future collaboration, including the BL collection of Shang dynasty oracle bones, an exchange programme for young librarians and cataloguers, and the digitisation of rare items such as the Yongle Dadian holdings in the BL Chinese collections.
Read the announcement in full here.
