Easier said than done
The organizer, to attract public interest, posted pageant advertisements in many universities and sometimes even directly approached girls who were accompanied by their parents to introduce the new competition.
The first day saw only 50 applicants, but by the final day over 842 girls were registered. The selection criteria focused on a girl's appearance, with measurements of the chest, waist, hips, leg and neck length factored into the evaluation scheme.
Besides the physical elements, contestants were also required to give a performance for the judges and elaborate on their own ideas of what constitutes beauty. By early May, 300 young women had made the cut and were set to parade into the quarter-final of the contest.
The next round of competition required the contestants to wear bikinis. Each hopeful was required to walk toward the panel of judges and then return backstage.
Though it may seem tame now, this round was later described by Time Magazine as a "great challenge to the traditional concepts and remnants of feudal ideology." Zhao confessed, "The requirement was too bold I know, but at the same time, people witnessed a change in Beijing." After this round, 50 of the young women stood out from the crowd.
At the beginning of the contest only a few media outfits, including the sponsoring magazine Contemporary Television, reported on the competition, but later, as word spread, more media from home and abroad came to cover the story.
Imitation is the greatest form flattery they say, and the brain child of the three friends soon provoked a wave of even more flashy beauty contests across the country.
Exposure to a wider range of people was good news for organizers, but at the same time governmental bodies also began to take the phenomenon seriously. A similar event planned for Shanghai was announced, then canceled, by the Shanghai authority, and governmental financial pressures were the twin swords that forced the Beijing contest to end prematurely as well.
At a low-key closing "tea party", the judges selected 13 of the 50 young women to be honored as "impressive competitors" "The tea party was not broadcast by any media and the result of the contest and the names of all the 13 outstanding young women went unpublished," recalled Jiang.
Failure as part of success
As it turned out, the aborted competition got people here to re-consider the beauty pageant concept. "A beauty contest is not only about outer beauty, it is also about inner beauty," asserts Zhao. Though the competition named no "Flower of Beijing", Zhao recalls competitors at the "tea party" were bonded by the experience and "many of the girls cried and hugged each other afterwards." He believes most of them formed friendships destined to last a lifetime.
The competition ignited in the young contestants a great enthusiasm for "allowing girls to be girls," concluded one participant. Although the contest could be described as a failure in the end, it is still remembered as a social milestone - the nation's first beauty pageant in the 39 years since the founding of new China in 1949.
