Language contest a bridge to better bonds

Participants in Mandarin speaking competition are eager to improve their future ties with China

For 22-year-old Belgian Lucas Deckers, an unexpected benefit of learning Mandarin was finding a Chinese girlfriend. Another bonus was winning the 19th Chinese Bridge Chinese Proficiency Competition for Foreign College Students last month.

The annual competition, organized by the Ministry of Education's Center for Language Education and Cooperation and Yangshipin, the new media platform of the China Media Group, was moved online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, the changes did not deter foreign students' enthusiasm for learning Mandarin, with hundreds of thousands of students signing up for this year's competition, according to the organizers.

Since its launch in 2002, the competition has been successfully held 19 times, attracting more than 1.4 million participants from over 150 countries to demonstrate their Mandarin skills and knowledge about China's culture and history, the organizers said.

Deckers said wining the competition was a great confidence boost, but it also increased pressure on him to further improve his Mandarin.

"I remember the moment was kind of weird because I was just in my room by myself, and I couldn't really celebrate with my family until a day later," he said. "I needed some time to realize that I had won."

Deckers, who also speaks Dutch, French and English, started learning Mandarin when he enrolled for a Sinology degree at KU Leuven University in Belgium at age 18.

He chose the major because of his long-held desire to see the world and travel to a faraway place like China."That's what attracted me to study Mandarin in the first place. But after I started, my passion for China grew really fast. I suddenly started to like everything about Chinese culture."

At the university he met his girlfriend from the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region who is one year his junior. She helped him with his Mandarin and preparation for the competition. "We have our secret communication system. When we do not want other people to understand us, we speak Mandarin in Belgium and Dutch in China," he said.

Deckers went to Chongqing Normal University as an exchange student last year and instantly fell in love with Chongqing.

One of his biggest passions is cooking, and he thinks Chinese food is delicious.

As he was unable to return to China due to the pandemic, Lucas started to post clips on the video platform Bilibili to share his life in Belgium and talk about cultural differences between East and West.

His channel Lukesiyi, which combines his name Lucus with the Mandarin idiom bukesiyi, meaning something unimaginable, has garnered almost 20,000 fans.

"I want my life to become unimaginably good and I am ready to work hard for it," he said."I hope to return to China as soon as possible, and when China reopens its borders to foreign students I will immediately go there, because I can't wait."