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National English Public Speaking Contest Organizer Picked Topic: To Praise the Party

A national annual English public speaking contest that the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press hosted drew wide critics online. Considered among the top ranking English public speaking contests in China, the contest [Editor’s note: https://uchallenge.unipus.cn/] is open to college students under the age of 35. The preliminary contest is held from June to October; the provincial finals are held before November 8; and the national finals are held from December 6th to 10th. In the past years, the assigned topics have been closely related to life events or have been about Chinese culture. This year, however, the topic is “Red Star over China.” It asked the contestants to sing praises to the party. People complained that the organizer is simply “training a new generation of party spokespersons.” The authorities have deleted all of the online negative comments.

“Red Star over China” is a 1937 book by an American pro-communist journalist, Edgar Snow. The book describes to Western readers an accounting of the Chinese Communist Party when it was a guerrilla army.

Source: Radio Free Asia, May 21, 2021
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/speech-05212021035809.html