Full coverage: ‘看中國’外國青年影像計劃專題

By CCTV.com Panview

Editor's foreword: "Looking China" International Youth Film Project is co-organized by the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture (AICCC), Beijing Normal University and Huilin Foundation. The program focuses on the young participants’ personal experiences of Chinese culture and encourages them to discover and tell Chinese stories from their own perspectives.

As of the year 2017, students from all over the world were invited to participate in the project. They were stationed in 12 municipality, provinces and autonomous regions here in China. Every filmmaker has worked out a 10-minute short film about Chinese culture around the topic of "Craftsmanship·Inheritance·Innovation.”

The short film, 'The End of the Tunnel,' directed by Maishe Mosala and produced by Liu Xiaoyang, features a young man, a construction worker, helping to dig tunnels for the new Xiamen Subway system.

He takes pride in his work as the main driver of the Shield Tunneling Machine, since he's required to make rigorous safety checks and inspections even before running it each day. But the machine can dig out much dirt when fully-operational.

He tells viewers that as a primary school student, he felt "embarrassed" about construction laborers, even though his father was one of them. But he learned to love his job and appreciate his father more as he sees himself playing a crucial role to build the Xiamen Subway.

So, it's not about whether you have a job as an employee in an office or a construction laborer, what's most important is doing your duties and responsibilities to the best of your abilities and that’s how you really make the world a better place.

We all need to recognize the value of blue collar work and how manual laborers keep the country up and running.

(The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Panview or CCTV.com. )

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