On the morning of December 14, 2023, Wang Shoujun, Vice President of Beijing Normal University (BNU), Director of the Administrative Committee of Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai (BNU Zhuhai) and Dean of Belt and Road School (BRS), met with Dromart Otorbaev, Distinguished Professor of BRS and former Prime Minister of the Kyrgyz Republic, on Zhuhai Campus for work exchanges.

Otorbaev expressed his heartfelt congratulations to Wang Shoujun. He congratulated China on its great achievements that have attracted worldwide attention in the past ten years since it proposed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and BNU has led the way in international education under BRI, training a large number of high-quality talented professionals for more than 90 countries that are co-building the BRI and making unique contributions to promoting the country’s economic and social development and improvement of people’s livelihood. Based on his personal experience of teaching BRS students at Changping campus and Zhuhai campus in October and December, he believes that the quality of freshmen in the college has been further improved, and emphasized the importance of improving the quality of freshmen in the talent training process.

Otorbaev pointed out that BRS is a very distinctive school that is of great significance in supporting the high-quality development of BRI advocated by China and is conducive to promoting the enhancement of many developing countries. The important contents such as China's national governance and local governance experience and Chinese-style modernization experience that students of BRS gain at BNU will help their respective countries learn from and refer to China's relevant development experience and explore modern development paths suitable for their respective national conditions to accelerate their modernization development process. Relying on these cohorts of students, BNU is effectively promoting the practical implementation of building a community with a shared future for mankind, further strengthening the ties and friendship between the countries these students are from and China, and supporting common development.

Otorbaev put forward three specific suggestions for the work of BRS. The first is to strengthen the alumni work of the School and better achieve the above-mentioned goals and missions through alumni work. Second, special attention should be paid to regional and country research, and through in-depth regional and country research, BRS should lead high-quality joint construction of the Belt and Road to achieve positive results, avoid debt crises, and guard against investment risks. The research focus should be on China’s surrounding areas, especially in strengthening systematic research on the economy, society, politics, law, culture and other aspects of Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East to provide important reference for high-quality joint construction of the Belt and Road. The School must be more proactive in making good use of distinguished professors of BRS, allowing them to participate more in regional and country research and achieve world-class high-quality research results. The third is to pay attention to the training of young teachers in the School. The current number is still relatively small and needs to be strengthened in conjunction with the needs of regional and national research and teaching.

Wang Shoujun expressed his gratitude to Otorbaev and hoped that the distinguished professors would advise on the work of the university and school from an international perspective and make new contributions to building BRS into a world-class school with BNU characteristics.