Mandarin speech contest for US students bridges culture divide

The 13th Chinese Bridge Speech Contest for US high school students was held on Saturday at the Confucius Institute (CI) at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. This year, 26 students from 14 states competed in the finals. The annual language contest has been gathering American high school students to test their Chinese proficiency since 2007. So far, the program has attracted more than 10,000 students from 140 high schools throughout the US.