In this week’s Southern Weekly(ÂçóÊñπÂë®Êú´) is an op-ed piece that argues that a certain level of cultural ignorance is excusable.
The article is a rather delayed reaction to the CCTV Young Singer Competition that took place earlier this year. The opinion column the author mentions was originally published in May, but it strangely reappeared online under a pseudonym just recently.Recently, I discovered from an article written by Mr. Qi FuÔºàÈΩ꧴Ժâ that during the testing segment of this year’s CCTV Youth Singing Competition, a singer didn’t know the names of the two Chinese-American scientists who were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. Mr. Qi Fu said that after that singer “saw that the correct answer was Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao, and heard Yu QiuyuÔºà‰ΩôÁßãÈõ®Ôºâ‘s detailed commentary, he stated frankly, ‘I really have never heard of Yang Zhenning before.’ At this point, if Prof. Yang Zhenning were sitting at home watching the Youth Singing Competition, he surely would have felt a chill.” Upon reading this article, and the quoted commentary by Mr. Yu Qiuyu, I really felt that something wasn’t right, and couldn’t help but think that it was unfair to this young singer who “really had never heard of Yang Zhenning before.”…[Full Text]