English competition to empower youths to tell China’s stories

China offers much more than just the Great Wall, pandas and Peking duck — but that's as far as most Chinese media aimed at international audiences go.

Enter the China Stories English Talent Competition, a free contest launched at the head office of The Commercial Press in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon.

An expected 20,000 entrants from the primary school, secondary school and university levels, from over 200 cities and 10,000 schools and language training organizations, will make speeches demonstrating their ability to tell Chinese stories to an international audience.

Directed by The World of Chinese magazine, and coproduced by Person Wisdom Education, the contest shares its slogan—"China is a story, we tell it"—with The World of Chinese, an English-language publication started by The Commercial Press in 2006. "The idea of the slogan is that every Chinese person is part of China's story, and has an obligation to tell China's story well," noted Yu Dianli, general manager of The Commercial Press, at the contest's launch ceremony.

The contest was inspired by the magazine's mission to tell tenaciously reported long-form stories about contemporary Chinese culture and society, and to present China in an authentic and accessible way to an international audience. "It is our vision to expand the number of stories told about China in order to fill the knowledge gaps about contemporary Chinese society in the outside world," explained Emily Conrad, editor and reporter at The World of Chinese, who originally hails from the United States.