Taiwanese debaters achieved a historically significant result this year by advancing to the quarterfinals at the World Schools Debating Championships (WSDC). After qualifying for the out-rounds with 4 wins and 13 ballots, Team Taiwan won debates against traditional debate powerhouses Wales and Netherlands. Although Team Taiwan lost the Quarter Finals to three time champion team Singapore last Tuesday night, Team Taiwan’s achievements are still a historic milestone for Taiwan in the international debate community.
WSDC is the premier international English debate tournament for high school students. Each summer hundreds of high school debaters from all around the world travel to the host country and spend 10 days debating issues from social justice and technology to economics and international politics. Each nation is allowed only one representative team of three to five debaters, and each team must agree to debate any assigned motion, allowing teenagers from all over the globe to debate the merits and drawbacks of myriad real world policies, sometimes even about their home country.
Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s in-person WSDC event in Mexico was cancelled and instead the first ever online WSDC tournament was held. Many welcomed the new format, with many more individuals and nations now able to attend without the high costs of travelling internationally. This increased accessibility and the growing popularity of WSDC resulted in a record number of 67 participating nations.
Team Taiwan’s achievements are even more impressive given the number of debaters in the competition. Breaking past preliminary rounds in 11th place globally and finishing in the top 8, Taiwanese debaters made a strong showing that outperformed several previous world champion teams.
As the Taiwan Debate Union only began coaching the national team in 2015, Team Taiwan can also be considered one of the youngest teams in the World Schools circuit to make it past the preliminary rounds.
The five debaters representing Taiwan (Aaron Chen, Kohei Watanabe, Si-Wai Chiu, Jessica Oh, and Frank Chiu) were selected in tryouts late last year as part of the Taiwan National Debate Pool, a training program for thirty middle school and high school debaters. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, the debaters have been able to participate in virtual tournaments in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, with Team Taiwan members honing their skills in preparatory competitions before the WSDC. On the other hand, Taiwanese debaters had to battle irregular sleep schedules and fatigue, as the tournaments were held across different time zones . The impromptu debate rounds, whose motions are only released an hour before the first speech starts, also required debaters to develop voracious reading habits to keep up with developments in international affairs, in order to build a sufficient knowledge base for debate.
WSDC Team Taiwan’s training and selection process are organized by Taiwan Debate Union, a not-for-profit organization devoted to advancing English parliamentary debate in Taiwan. Founded in 2014 by Taiwanese debaters Wen-Yu Weng and Jeff Tsai, the organization now provides regular intensive training to over fifty debaters through their high school and university level programs and serves in an advisory capacity to many of the country’s debate societies.
Taiwan’s increasingly impressive achievements on the international stage is noteworthy especially when compared to countries with a more developed debating scene (including regional neighbors such as China, the Philippines, Malaysia or Singapore), where WSDC selection organizations are able to benefit from a flourishing competitive debate community and are often able to pick the best candidates from an already excellent pool of debaters. In Taiwan, the WSDC selection and training often starts from scratch — with Taiwan Debate Union nurturing young debaters through years of training before they reach WSDC potential. Though different from many other selection systems where small elite groups of debaters are trained with high intensity, this process allows for increased accessibility to high quality debate training for many middle and high school students.
Between the head coaches (Wen-Yu Weng, Jeff Tsai, Zoe Saelim and Katharin Tai), the core team at Taiwan Debate Union has invested many hours of hard work in fostering debating excellence, alongside returning alums and local university debaters.
Reflecting on the fruits of over half a decade, Weng wrote in a Facebook post that though Taiwan Debate Union has grown tremendously from their first 2015 WSDC season when the tiny staff didn’t dare “hope for more than sending a national team to WSDC,” the organization “remains committed to spreading the love of debate — choosing to always expand the accessibility of our programs instead of focusing our resources on a few elite.” Due to the expensive cost of in-person debating competitions, coaches are constantly seeking out sponsorships in the hopes that English debate in Taiwan will become increasingly accessible.
Despite their students’ growing success on the international debate stage, the coaches maintain that competition results are not the primary motivation for their passion in debating. “I don’t think any of the coaches teach debating purely for the sake of the sport,” said Weng. “I think we see it as a means to teach critical thinking, foster teamwork and leadership skills, and inculcate democratic thinking through better understanding of political and social issues.”
For her and the other coaching staff, debate is a model for how students can learn to engage with difficult topics in the outside world, as well as a model for how Taiwanese education can move beyond the traditional classroom and provide the necessary skills for students to succeed in an uncertain future. The organization further notes that its mission to promote English rhetorical excellence through debate aligns perfectly with the Taiwanese government’s ambition to become a bilingual nation by 2030.
Taiwan Debate Union hopes to expand by collaborating with more public and bilingual schools, training more teachers and alums to be qualified debate coaches, and organizing more accessible English debating events in Taiwan for debaters of all ages. Earlier this year, the Union organized Taiwan Online Debate Open (an online debate tournament that drew more than fifty high caliber debate teams from around the world) in a bid to draw more recognition to Taiwan as a serious debating nation and increase the exposure of Taiwanese debaters to world class competitors.
(Feature photo courtesy of Dennis Yang)
