Global youth champion grassroots governance at inaugural SISU contest

The inaugural "Global Governance · Future Leaders" multilingual speech contest concluded on Friday at Shanghai International Studies University's (SISU) Hongkou campus.

Jointly organized by the Global South Academic Forum, East China Normal University and SISU, the event saw 16 finalists from 11 institutions worldwide competing in English, Spanish and French on the theme "Global South Grassroots Governance: Responding to Global Governance Initiatives, Writing Our Own Governance Stories".

Participants delivered prepared speeches and engaged in Q&A sessions. Judges evaluated them on content, language skills and delivery, comprehensively scoring the participants' multilingual communication capabilities with real understanding of governance.

The competition encourages firsthand narrations based on their personal experiences or field research, guiding young people to draw on real-life cases and examine how grassroots governance addresses the actual needs of local residents.

The speech topics reflected the youth's concerns. Some discussed rural revitalization, village transformation, and how communities become weekend destinations.

Others examined digital governance and community mutual aid, including cases from China and Kazakhstan, digital support networks in Shanghai, and how mobile phones are reshaping community management.

Still others focused on grassroots co-governance and shared lessons, touching on a Chinese model for resolving disputes at the community level, and exploring into governance practices in different places worldwide.

At the award ceremony, experts from SISU praised the contestants for their use of authentic stories, logical argument, cross-cultural empathy, as well as their global perspective and thinking, language skills and the sense of responsibility.

"Participating in global governance requires not only language skills to build bridges of communication, but also the support of intellectual power," said SISU President Meng Zhongjie at the competition.

He encouraged the youth to further integrate their language skills and cross-cultural communication competencies with their knowledge in governance, as well as to actively engage in fieldwork and draw insights from the vibrant grassroots governance practices of the Global South.

Ma Tan contributed to this story.