Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Winners of the World Universities Debating Championship requested their names be redacted from tournament records

SCMP:
A topic on Hong Kong democracy in the finals of the world’s largest international university debating tournament has caused a stir, after mainland Chinese spectators were said to have walked out and the winning team asked for their names to be removed from the records.

The World Universities Debating Championships (WUDC) was held on January 3 in Bangkok. Organisers cancelled a live stream of the event midway.

About 30 mainland Chinese students and teachers who were in the audience left the venue after the motion “This House, as China, would grant universal suffrage to Hong Kong citizens” was announced, according to sources.

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The winning team [was] from the University of Oxford
From the organizer's statement:
We would like to take this moment to explicitly squash some rumours going around- There was no involvement or pressure from any national body, embassy or official to "make the finals go away". All decisions made were based on comprehensive discussions between the equity team, adj core and the relevant WUDC participants about what would be best for their welfare.

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Having been made acutely aware of how speakers in the final and some other members of the community felt, as a follow-up, we decided to proactively offer all teams and judges at the tournament the option to redact their status on the tab if they felt that it would put them in a compromising position.