Mon, December 08, 2008
BEIJING, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- A Tibetan postwoman walking over 200,000 kilometers in ten years to send mails for mountain villagers, a Beijing Olympic champion and a rocket engineer have been selected as Chinese youth's role models in 2008, it was announced on Sunday.
Others honored as the top ten Outstanding Chinese Youth of the Year included two journalists, a worker at a joint venture auto company and a soldier soprano, the All-China Youth Federation, organizer of the annual activity, said in a brief statement.
Although the federation published little information of the ten winners on Sunday, their inspiring stories had been intensively reported through the media.
All of their stories are about selfless devotion to career, remarkable contribution to the well-being of fellow country people, and great inspiration.
Nyima Lamo, a 32-year-old Tibetan woman, has been working as a mailwoman for almost ten years for mountain-locked villages in Deqin County, southwest China's Yunnan Province, according to a report on the website of the China Central Television (CCTV).
Because poor road conditions made transportation impossible, Nyima Lamo has to walk on foot across deep valleys and snow-capped mountains, often risking her life, in order to send mails to villagers.
She would not take pregnancy leave even when she was nine months pregnant because she did not want to delay letters, the report said, adding that the total length of roads Nyima Lamo had walked was more than 200,000 km.
Zhao Haiqing's story touched millions of Chinese after his hometown in Beichuan County of Sichuan Province was deadly struck by an 8.0-magnitude earthquake on May 12.
The 36-year-old village official, also injured in the quake, led fellow villagers to rescue 67 people trapped under debris and transport over 2,100 injured people to hospitals. However, he lost six family members including his son and parents in the earthquake, said a CCTV report.
Defending champion Liu Chunhong broke all the world records in the women's 69 kilogram weightlifting category of the Beijing Olympic Games on Aug. 13, making herself a household name overnight.
Song Zhengyu, a 38-year-old rocket expert, also won nationwide respect for his great contribution to the development of the Long March family of rockets, which successfully sent the manned Shenzhou-7 spacecraft on September 25.
The ten people were selected out of 30 candidates throughout the nation. The awarding ceremony will be held in January 2009.
