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Davos Debate winners: We serve as keys

By Xie Jingwei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-09-15 22:48

"I didn't know much about the Davos meeting," said Li Dongjie, a 22-year-old Shanghai resident.

He didn't until he and Li Mingzheng, a 28-year-old freelancer from Chengdu, were invited to participate in the Summer Davos 2010 with all expenses paid as winners of the Davos Debates.

The Davos Debates Contest, the first-ever World Economic Forum event to collect videos from Chinese internet users, invited participants to submit a video to Youku that answered a question about sustainability and growth. A jury consisting of Youku, Ogilvy China and the World Economic Forum selected the 10 finalists from more than 130 videos submitted.

Li Dongjie and Li Mingzheng's videos were considered to best illustrate the theme of the meeting in creative and unusual ways. Over 10,000 users of Youku, China's leading video website, voted to send them to the meeting held in Tianjin from Sept 13 to Sept 15.

A screen catch of Li Dongjie's video "View the sustainability in a Confucius way"

Li Dongjie, a recent graduate from Raffle International Design Institute at Donghua University and has worked as a multi-media designer and freelancer in Shanghai, put together an interesting animation video which captured the importance of sustainable growth.

Enlightened by an essay about the connection between Confucianism and the sustainable growth, Li Dongjie believes this theory can also be expounded visually and thus be understood by more people.

In his video named "View the sustainability in a Confucius way", he produced an ink-painting animation depicting a tree, symbolizing Confucianism, growing branches such as loyalty, humaneness, filial piety and sustainability.

"For Chinese, sustainability is not new. It has been in Chinese people's blood for thousands of years," said Li Dongjie, "What we need to do is to carry it forward. So I combined the traditional ink painting and computer software such as 3D. Using the modern way to interpret a traditional ideal may make it better understood."

A screen catch of Li Mingzheng's video "A dog who protects the environment"

Li Mingzheng is a freelancer and popular paike (video blogger) on Chinese social networks in Chengdu. Li's video illustrated how everyone can make a difference in their community.

In Li's video, a dog named Niuniu is trained to pick up discarded beverage bottles in the street with his mouth and put them into a basket. The video has become an internet sensation with more than 300,000 hits in just a couple of days.

"We've heard enough about the words ‘low carbon'. But too much talking, too little action. So I made this video to urge people to put the ideal into action," said Li Mingzheng.

"I'll keep recording things about environment protection in the future," he said.

Li Dongjie and Li Mingzheng discussed sustainability with many participants at a Summer Davos Debates video corner. So far more than 50 participants have stopped by the corner to discuss sustainabilty including Thomas Crampton, Michael Elliot, Ola Ahlvarsson, JP Rangaswami and Victor Koo, CEO of Youku.

They also present local level reports about the meeting by chronicling their experiences in their video diaries.

"It doesn't matter how many of our opinions can be heard by the world government and business leaders, as long as we are here, more people will be concerned about sustainability because of us," said Li Mingzheng.

Li Dongjie agreed with a metaphor: "We serve as keys to open the door of Davos meeting to the general public. We represent a trend and there will be more keys in the future. I believe more ordinary people will join the brainstorm on Davos' topics."

Li Dongjie (L) and Li Mingzheng talk at the Summer Davos Debates video corner in Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center in Tianjin Sept 14. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions, also known as the Summer Davos, is one of the most open and publicly engaging events ever held in China, forum organizers said.

The forum has teamed up with leading social media outlets both in and outside of China to provide a robust public outreach campaign, organizers said in a statement.

The forum Blog, www.forumblog.org, includes blog posts from participants, providing an inside look at what it is like to take part in the event and showcases the interesting and new ideas discussed at the meeting.

The forum has also launched Twitter accounts and a QQ number to ensure people stay informed.

During press conferences, the general public has the opportunity to submit live questions through Twitter and Facebook.

The forum, the fourth of its kind since 2007, will last from Sept 13 to Sept 15 in China's north port city of Tianjin, attracting political leaders, scholars and business executives from across the world, especially from emerging economies and industries.