Zhao Huchen, Class 7, Senior 1, Shenzhen Foreign Languages School Instructed by Liu Xin

The UNESCO Model United Nation Conference, an activity that aims to cultivate students’ international visions, usually falls in April in my school every year. This year, I participated as a UNESCO reporter. The topic of this year’s UNESCO conference was “the protection of cultural pluralism.”

In the first and second sessions, delegates explained the present situation of their domestic traditional cultures and the measures that had been conducted to protect them.

As a reporter, my job was to write news about the content of the congress. At the beginning, due to a lack of experience, I tried to write down every single word that the delegates said, which resulted in my engaging much time in gathering information instead of conceiving the structure of the news. Having noticed that, I started to make my notes explicit but concise for the following sessions.

Moreover, I incorporated my ideas into the news. From my perspective, the essence of culture pluralism protection is the development of the economy.

As the saying goes, the economic base decides superstructure. The protection of the cultural pluralism also depends largely on the development of the economy. By using this method the poorer countries with assorted cultures can not only accelerate their economic growth, but also popularize their cultures so as to prevent them from being assimilated in the trend of globalization and fading over time.

In my news, I pointed out that legislation and education was not the ultimate solution of the problems that the developing countries were confronting. The core of the problem was economic issues and to solve it required multilateral cooperation. Soon after the news was released, the delegate of China called for mutual economic assistance among developing countries to protect cultural pluralism and received extensive support.

I really enjoyed myself at the conference. It allowed me to think about the international situation profoundly and it freed my mind from school work.