From Sarah Palin to Oprah Winfrey to Diane Sawyer, the pageant route can be somewhat the place to meet ambitious, successful women, and China is no exception. At just 22, Yuan Jing is a deputy to the National People's Congress from Jiangsu Province, an alternate member of the Chinese Communist Youth League Central Committee, and was competing for the coveted Miss Chinese International Title in Hong Kong.

She was performing extremely well, finishing second out of over a thousand contestants in the preliminary round, but dropped out last week. Why? Yuan says she was "too busy to continue the contest," and that she has "a heavy workload," however that explanation may just be part of the issue. Many Internet users weren't too excited about a politician competing for a beauty pageant title.

Some Internet users assessed her, saying that she shouldn't be chasing crowns when she supposed to be helping the people, but others defended her assessment, saying that her participation wouldn't unavoidably conflict with her governmental obligations. Yuan says she didn't pay attention to peer pressure or negative responses, and in its place "would walk my own way".

Strangely enough, even though citizens can't vote in political elections, narrowing down contestants for their beauty pageant is a quite democratic process. Yuan needed to win votes from Internet users to steps forward in the pageant, whereas citizens of Jiangsu Province don't actually have much say when it comes to determining government officials.

If anything, her partaking has given her the coveted media point up, which she might never make out if she continued with business as usual in Jiangsu. Moving back from a pageant she had a legitimate possibility of winning could as well have raised her profile even more than if she had gone all the way without gaining the coveted title.

At this moment, Yuan is still young, and while her pageant dreams look as if to be taking a backseat to political ambitions right now, she has a clear future ahead of her, filled with lots of possibilities.

Source: cbn.com