China is "an extremely important member" of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and plays an important role in protecting its rich cultural and natural heritage, the head of UNESCO has said in a recent exclusive interview with Xinhua.

Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, told Xinhua on Monday afternoon that "China is an extremely important member of UNESCO in practically all the mandate of activity, but especially in culture, because it's a country with Asian culture and a lot of heritage."

UNESCO, with its headquarters in Paris, was created in 1946 to build lasting world peace based on the intellectual and moral solidarity of humankind. Its areas of work are education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture and communication. "China has 38 monuments inscribed on the World Heritage List," Bokova said. "The Chinese are very much interested in, and China is also an important member of, ... the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which is one of the new tendencies in the thinking of what heritage is on the whole."

"China has already instituted category -- we say this is our jargon -- a national institute for world heritage and established one such institute for intangible heritage," Bokova noted.

"Also, the Chinese play an important role in the overall debate on culture and development," she said.

Bokova voiced her hope to see a bigger Chinese role in the coming UN high-level conference on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), scheduled for September at the UN Headquarters in New York.

"What we at UNESCO would like to see, now that we will assess the MDGs here in New York in September, I think it's time we put an emphasis on the link between culture and development, and I hope that China will be an active partner in this debate," she said.

"China is already a very active member, (there is a) Chinese member of the executive board, Chinese members of a number of other subsidiary bodies of UNESCO," she said.

"Chinese (are) contributing very much to the science sector, the activities that we do," she said. "Chinese are also promoting South-South cooperation in the area of education. This is an activity that we are very much involved with."

"I think that with this active participation of China in promoting the new challenges in front of UNESCO, ... we can move forward with a very strong agenda," Bokova stressed.

Bokova, born in 1952 and a mother of two grown children, has been a member of the UNESCO Executive Board since 2007. She was the Bulgarian ambassador to France and Monaco, and the personal representative of the Bulgarian president to the "Organization Internationale de la Francophonie" and the permanent delegate to UNESCO from 2005 to 2009.

Thanks to her diversified study experiences, Bokova can speak fluent English, Russian, French and Spanish besides her mother tongue.

(Xinhua News Agency January 20, 2010)