Translated with AI
On July 10, 2025, the International Orchid Award ceremony was held in Beijing. One of the ten laureates of 2025 was Rashid Alimov, professor at the Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Tajikistan, former Secretary General of the SCO and former Ambassador of Tajikistan to China (2005-2015), nominated for the Orchid Award for “outstanding contributions, creative leadership and unwavering commitment to promoting global sustainability, cultural diversity and dialogue among civilizations,” according to People's Daily.
The Orchid Prize was established by the China International Communication Group (CICG) to reward foreign individuals and organizations that promote cultural exchanges between China and other countries and contribute to strengthening inter-civilization dialogue.
The award was also received by former UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra (USA), Maxime Vivas (France), Isaac Abiola (Nigeria), Thomas Rabe (Germany), Stuart Vigin (Great Britain), Ellyn Greg Cheney McElneis (USA), Ali Muhammad Sabehi (Iran) and Zafar Ud-din Mahmood (Pakistan).
From 2016 to 2018, Alimov served as Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). During his tenure, he helped advance the SCO's first expansion, strengthening the organization's international influence. He is the author of a number of academic papers on China-Tajikistan civilizational dialogue, cultural exchanges between China and Central Asia, and in particular the global significance of China's path to modernization and the Belt and Road Initiative. These papers have been published in various countries around the world. In 2012, he was awarded the Silk Road Prize for Cultural Cooperation. In 2023, Alimov received the Special Book Award of China, the highest national award in the field of literature, translation, and publishing, presented to citizens of foreign countries for outstanding contributions to strengthening dialogue among civilizations and popularizing the achievements of modern China.
Alimov is well known in China not only as an outstanding diplomat who has done much to strengthen and develop Tajik-Chinese relations of friendship, cooperation and deep strategic partnership, promoting the principles of the “Shanghai spirit” in the international arena, but also as a publicist and the author of a number of books on the topic of modern international relations and intercultural dialogue.
In 2008, on the eve of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, Alimov's beautifully illustrated book "Sharshar Conquers Beijing" about the adventures of a schoolboy from Tajikistan who reached Beijing from Dushanbe along the Great Silk Road first appeared on the shelves of bookstores in the Chinese capital and other cities of the country. The book was warmly received by readers and in a short time won a wide audience, having gone through two additional editions with a print run of many thousands.
In 2012, Alimov's book "Tajikistan-China: Dialogue of Cultures" was published in Beijing in Chinese and Russian, which also aroused great interest not only in China, Russia and the countries of Central Asia, but also in the countries of the Western world. This book, in particular, replenished the book collections of the Library of Congress of the United States, Columbia, Pennsylvania and a number of other American universities. In 2014, Alimov's monograph "Tajikistan and China: the Course of Strategic Partnership" was published, which became the first textbook on the modern history of Tajik-Chinese relations.
And Alimov’s two-volume work on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, published in Moscow in 2017 and 2018 (“SCO: Formation, Development, Prospects” and “SCO: Global Profile in International Relations”) was recognized as a kind of “SCO encyclopedia”, translated into Chinese and is still in demand both in the expert community and in the university environment of the SCO member states.
Alimov is a Doctor of Political Science, an honorary professor at a number of Chinese, Russian and Uzbek universities, the author of 16 books and over 200 articles on international relations and intercivilizational dialogue. For almost 20 years, Professor Alimov has been collaborating with one of the world's leading newspapers, Renmin Ribao, as well as with China Daily and the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Bo. Collaboration with the latter resulted in the publication of a whole series of literary essays and poems, which at the end of 2018 formed the basis of a collection in Chinese entitled Everything I Cherish So Much.
(Editor: Deng Jie, Yang Qian)
