The 13th Chinese Bridge — Chinese Proficiency Competition for Foreign College Students hosted by Hunan TV will commence at the beginning of July, 2014, and contestants from all over the world will compete to prove their Chinese language abilities. As a highlight of the event, an online activity themed “Looking for the Most Beautiful Chinese Character” was launched through the "Chinese Bridge" official microblog on June 10th. The selected character will be written by 120 contestants and master of Chinese traditional culture at the opening ceremony to be held at Yuelu Academy.

　　As an international Chinese proficiency competition, the Chinese Bridge Contest is sponsored by the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban). Since the first session in 2002, the competition has been held for 12 sessions and attracted more than 300,000 college students around the world to showcase themselves in the preliminary matches, among which over 1,000 college students from more than 80 countries have been invited to China for the finals. The competition tests the contestants' Chinese language abilities, knowledge of China’s condition and skills of Chinese culture, as well as their comprehensive learning ability. The candidates have to go through a preliminary match respectively in their own countries, and the winners are then invited to China for the finals, where they are awarded scholarships by the Confucius Institute. The competition serves as an important platform for international students to learn Chinese and understand China, and acts as a bridge for mutual learning and friendship building.

　　The Chinese Bridge competition officially settled down at Hunan TV in 2008, which has been held for 6 sessions up to now. One of the highlights of this year is the innovative opening ceremony. Differing from the past party styled events, the opening ceremony will be held on July 22th at Yuelu Academy, the one-thousand-year-old institution of higher education in Changsha of Hunan Province. Yuelu Academy, as one of the four major academies in ancient China, has cultivated a large number of talents. The opening ceremony will be emceed by the famous host Wang Han from Hunan TV, and will select the most popular Chinese character based on online voting. The master of Chinese traditional culture and 120 candidates will write the character at the same time, marking the beginning of this competition.

　　Chinese source: bridge.chinese.cn