China's Political Beauty Queen Withdraws from Competition
October 14, 2008
From Sarah Palin to Oprah Winfrey to Diane Sawyer, the pageant circuit can be quite the place to meet ambitious, successful women, and China is no exception. At just 22, Yuan Jing is a deputy to the National People's Congress from Jiangsu Province, an alternate member of the Chinese Communist Youth League Central Committee, and was competing for the coveted Miss Chinese International Title in Hong Kong.
She was performing extremely well, finishing second out of over a thousand contestants in the preliminary round, but dropped out last week. Why? Yuan says she was "too busy to continue the contest," and that she has "a heavy workload," but that explanation may just be part of the issue. Many Internet users weren't too thrilled about a politician competing for a beauty pageant crown.
Some Internet users criticized her, saying that she shouldn't be chasing crowns when she should be helping the people, but others defended her decision, saying that her participation wouldn't necessarily conflict with her governmental obligations. Yuan says she didn't pay attention to peer pressure or negative responses, and instead "would walk my own way."
Oddly enough, even though citizens can't vote in political elections, narrowing down contestants for their beauty pageant is a fairly democratic process. Yuan needed to win votes from Internet users to progress in the pageant, whereas citizens of Jiangsu Province don't really have much say when it comes to determining government officials.
If anything, her participation has given her the coveted media spotlight, which she might never see if she continued with business as usual in Jiangsu. Withdrawing from a pageant she had a legitimate chance of winning could also have raised her profile even more than if she had gone all the way without gaining the coveted crown.
At this point, Yuan is still young, and while her pageant dreams seem to be taking a backseat to political ambitions right now, she has a bright future ahead of her, filled with many possibilities.
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