What Shenzhen taught me about the future of Asia-Pacific media

There are cities you visit and cities that make an argument. Shenzhen belongs to the second kind. Some four and a half decades ago it was a modest fishing town on the edge of the Pearl River Delta. Today it is one of the most technologically advanced cities on Earth, and it served as a fitting stage for a gathering about where media in our region is headed.

The Asia-Pacific Media Forum opened on Saturday in Shenzhen under the theme "Building a Path to Shared Prosperity for the Asia-Pacific Community: Media Consensus and Action". It brought together more than 400 representatives from over 220 media organizations, think tanks, government agencies, diplomatic missions and international bodies, drawn from 42 countries and regions. As one of the speakers, I came away with three convictions.

The first is that regional media cooperation is finally moving beyond goodwill. Forums often end with warm words and little else. This one produced architecture. At the opening ceremony, 16 founding organizations from China and abroad jointly formed the Organizing Committee of the Asia-Pacific Media Partnership Program, and participants endorsed a Shenzhen Consensus that covers open cooperation, digital, smart and green transformation, and media exchanges. The organizers described this as a shift from "scattered interaction" to "institutionalized collaboration". For those of us in Pakistan who have spent years building media bridges one partnership at a time, that shift matters enormously. Institutions outlast individual enthusiasm.