Hosted by the Tertiary Education Services Office, Macau SAR and organized by Debating and Speech Culture Association of Macao, “the 12th Macau Inter-College Debating Competition” completed successfully on December 16. MUST Cantonese Debating Team achieved the third place in this competition, team members Liu Jianhui and Zhang Jiahua also received the Best Debater Award at the preliminary round and at the third-place round respectively.
The contest followed the current events and concerned about social issues. And all teams opened intense debates over social focus such as the cancellation of the setback regulation, the practice of rent control, importing nurse, and the key problems in Macao.
In the semi-final in, the proposition side MUST and the opposition side University of Macau (hereafter “UM”) competed with the motion of “Whether Macau’s problem is a matter of economy.” MUST lost to UM by a slight margin, but both debaters’ sophisticated debating skills and their eloquent arguments before or in the contest left a deep impression on every audience. In the round of fighting the third place, the proposition side Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau and the opposition side MUST made a fierce debate over the motion “Whether the nursing sector should expand the labor import or not.” The For side argued that nurse industry should expand importing nurse staffing because they were in shortage, and on-the-job nurses workload was heavy and so on; while the Against side believed that enlarging the import of nursing manpower could not fundamentally solve the nurse staffing shortage problem, and questioned the rivals’ scope and definition of “expanding” to demonstrate themselves right. Both went head-to-head with each other and finally Zhang Jiahua the first debater of MUST won the Best Debater Award, meanwhile, MUST team with a score of 4:1 beat Kiang Wu Nursing College to be the third place.
MUST Cantonese debaters have gained valuable experience and learned a lot from communicating with opponents and judges in the contest. After the match, the debaters said they would train harder to broaden the way of thinking and make persistent efforts to obtain more outstanding achievements in the future.