change the world? change ourselves
good evening, honorable judges, ladies and gentlemen.
it’s my great pleasure to stand here to present my speech—change the world, change ourselves.
it’s noticable that western holidays are becoming increasingly popular day by day, while chinese traditional festivals are being somewhat neglected. not long before about 10 doctors in beijing university and qinghua unversity announced that we should reject the invasion of western holidays ,because they regard western holidays as an challenge against our traditional festivals and culture.
frankly speaking, i don’t quite agree with them.indeed, we should never neglect or even discard our traditonal festivals as china boasts a brilliant history and splendid traditions. (examples).but why can’t we absorb the meaningful western holidays and culture.
there are obvious reasons why some western holidays are so popular in china. on the one hand, some of the western holidays which we chinese don’t have are reasonable and meaningful, such as father’s day and april fool’s day etc. on the other hand,the prevalence of globalization enables western culture to prevail in china. overwhelmed by such a trend,chinese unconsiciously get involved in western holidays and culture.
with the further development of the whole world, the cultural communication between different countries and nations becomes faster and more and more important. we are indeed from different nations, but we are the citizens of the same world, so the outstanding culture of different nations is the commom wealth of everyone on the earth.the only way for us to protect our traditional culture is to reject the foreign culture? the answer is definitely no. what we ought to do is to spare no effort to educate chinese to get to know and treasure our splendid traditions instead of rejecting foreign culture. only by educating can we set our confidence and belief towards our culture. only by educating can we preserve and promote the wealth that our ancesters left for us.
at last i’d like to share a famouse saying of gandhi with all of you ,that is:if you want to change the world, then you must change yourself first.”