The Argentine embassy in China presented awards to six Chinese people in Beijing on Wednesday for their outstanding performance in a Spanish-writing competition.

With the theme of "Me and Argentina", the competition was jointly organized by the embassy, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Sichuan University and Xinhua Winshare Group.

The competition aimed to promote Chinese people's understanding and interest in Argentina, to promote the communication between the two countries and also promote learning Spanish in China, the embassy said.

It attracted nearly 150 Spanish learners from China, the oldest being 82 and the youngest only 10. First prize went to Li Yuqi, a Spanish major student from Peking University.

Spanish, also known as Castilian, is the world's second-most spoken native language - with 480 million native speakers and 90 million using it as a second-language - after Mandarin.

"It is quite difficult to compete in the contest, since you need to learn the language and, more importantly, have literariness in your writing," said Juan Cortelletti, counselor of the embassy. "But this could be an opportunity to inspire more Chinese to get to know the language."

Guo Cunhai, researcher at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that, geographically, Argentina and China are far away from each other. However, people’s hearts were much closer. He also suggested that a Chinese writing contest should be organized for Argentineans.

Ten other participants won nomination prizes.

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