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At the beginning of the year, the Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel (Francophone liberal) has called on our country’s diplomats to “put all the energy necessary” into promoting Belgium’s image abroad. Recently Belgium’s image abroad has suffered since it became clear that a number of those involved in last November’s terrorist attacks in Paris came from Brussels. But the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the fugitive terrorist, gave the Belgian image a boost. Now Charles Michel, together with Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt and with secretary of State Pieter De Crem is going for a visit to China. He will insist again that Belgium is not a place where lawlessness rules and that the measures that have been already taken, have led to the desired results. In China, the Belgian ministers will attend the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), an Asian version of the well-known World Economic Forum, organized every year in January in Davos, Switzerland. BFA is a nongovernmental and nonprofit international organization with a fixed conference date and a fixed domicile. Proposed in 1998 by Fidel V. Ramos, former President of the Philippines, Bob Hawke, former Prime Minister of Australia, and Morihiro Hosokawa, former Prime Minister of Japan, BFA was formally inaugurated on February 27 2001. Boao, Hainan Province, China serves as the permanent site of BFA Headquarters. Since 2002, BFA has been holding its annual conference at Boao.
BFA has won great support from Asian countries and drawn extensive attention of the whole world. Now, it has become a high-end platform for dialogues about the important issues in Asia and even the whole world among leaders of national governments, industrial and business circles, and academic circles of countries in Asia and other continents. BFA is dedicated to promoting Asian countries to achieve common development through further integration of regional economy.
The purpose of BFA is to base itself on Asia and promote and deepen the economic exchange, coordination, and cooperation within Asia and between Asia and other parts of the world. It also aims to offer a high-end dialogue platform for governments, enterprises, experts, and scholars to jointly discuss economy, society, and environment and other relevant issues. Through its working network with the political, business, and academic circles, BFA will serve the ever-growing economic cooperation among its members and between its members and other entities.
Corporations present at the BFA will also hear from the Belgian delegation about the efforts to promote Belgium as a safe country and of course still, as the center of Europe, where it is very interesting for Chinese companies to have business addresses, corporate and legal administrations, director services an financial and operational services, all of which are promoted by HDS corporate solutions.