For Hu Biliang, keeping pace with the times is a mantra of personal pride

Hu Biliang, executive director of the Belt and Road School at Beijing Normal University has spent nearly 10 years gathering some of the world's most brilliant minds together to cultivate future leaders and entrepreneurs, as well as run think tanks to research the political and economic issues related to the Belt and Road Initiative.

Inside an inconspicuous gray building housing the BRS, photographs of distinguished professors at the school - Zlatko Lagumdzija, former president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Djoomart Otorbaev, former Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan and Rajat M. Nag, former managing director general of the Asian Development Bank to name but a few - line the walls. All of them regularly fly to Beijing to give talks to students at the BRS.

According to Hu, most of the students are officials from government bodies in countries involved in the BRI. The school, which offers postgraduate and doctorate programs in public management and business administration, has nearly 200 graduates from more than 60 countries to date.