Should the US withdraw from East Asia and hand over its power to China? Should prisoners receive a Pell Grant to receive college education while in jail? Should governments ban people from driving if self-driving is fully developed?
These and many other popular topics were hotly debated during the recent second annual Shanghai International Debate Open at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE), which attracted 112 debate teams and 30 adjudicators from 56 top universities from across China and across the world.
According to Qiao Xiaomei, vice dean of the School of Foreign Studies, this year's debate enlisted the largest-ever number of participants in a nationwide debate. However, different from an Asian Parliamentary Debate, which has three debaters on each team and two teams in each round, the Shanghai Open adopted a British Parliamentary Style (BP), which has two debaters per team and four teams in a round.
"The teams work independently and are graded independently," Longwen Chiang, an independent adjudicator at the tournament, told the Global Times. "The same skills that make a good debater in other formats will also make a good debater in BP style," he added, explaining that in BP, debaters must have solid arguments and be good at making logical connections in order to "convince" the judges.
"I have learned from this tournament that only when I have solid grounds to support my argument can I convince my counterparts and win over the adjudicator," a debater from Sun Yat-sen University said during the tournament.
A collision of minds
Peking University exchange student Valeria Liseichikova from Belarus was invited as an independent adjudicator for Shanghai International Debate Open. Involved in debating back in her home country, she sees debating as a fun learning process and a means for self-improvement, as it requires participants to stay abreast of current international events as well as interact with equally-skilled debaters from multiple nations.
"The whole purpose of the debate is that it is inclusive to everyone from around the world," Liseichikova told the Global Times. "Even if they lose, being able to challenge their counterparts means that they delivered a good speech."
After two days of competitions, the team with debaters from Oxford University and the University of Hong Kong won the championship. Runners up included debaters from SUFE, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing Language and Culture University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Macau.
According to Qiao, SUFE's debate team was founded in 2008 and has become very popular among its students, who regularly attended their team's regional and national events as well as some international contests.
"Good debating requires not only logical thinking and improvisation, but also a depth and breadth of knowledge. In debate, great minds are brought into a collision with other minds," said Professor Huang Ying, vice president of SUFE. "It benefits not only the participants, but also the audience."
