Of all the prizes offered for contestants who participated in the Chinese Writing Contest 2021, the coolest one should be to become a published author. This is a recognition with a far reaching effect.

With the newly published book, Easy-to-Read Chinese Short Stories, Book 1, seventeen contestants have won this bragging right. Their work is now available for a wide range of audiences worldwide.

At the launch of this first ever Chinese Writing Contest 2021, which came with a strict requirement of 320 available Chinese characters, I did not expect the level of the writings could be so high. As I was reading the submissions, I was blown away time and time again. 

Perhaps, even if Dr. Seuss could write in Chinese, he would not have done any better!

This first ever Chinese Writing Contest closed a few days ago, on Sep 30, 2021.

30 qualified submissions are currently published online. Before we move on to the next step of finding out who the winners are, let’s take a moment and appreciate a whole new universe created collectively by these contestants using only 320 Chinese characters.

There are many Chinese Writing Contests. But this is the ONLY one that comes with a strict character requirement. Only a maximum of 320 unique Chinese characters can be used, and only 19 of them are allowed to be used as special characters. This requirement effectively places students who have studied Chinese for ten years in a position similar to those who have learned for just one year. And that is a good thing.