MACAO, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Residents of Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) will have the chance to name the panda pair given by the Chinese central government, under the naming contest launched by Macao SAR government on Tuesday.
According to the schedule proposed by Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (IACM), the first phase of the naming contest will be held from June 8 to July 5 to collect names for pandas proposed by residents. A government-appointed evaluation committee of up to seven members, including two from the Chinese mainland, will select 10 names five for each panda, from those names.
The public vote, which is the second phase of the contest, will take place from August 2 to August 23.
Each resident is eligible to take part in the naming contest once, and prizes for the contest of each panda will be 8,000 patacas (1,000 U.S. dollars), souvenirs and tickets to Chengdu for winner.
The central government has chosen two pandas, a male code-named 717 and a female code-named 710, from the Chengdu Research Base of Panda Breeding in southwest China's Sichuan province, as a gift to the SAR.
Chen Limin, Secretary for Administration and Justice, appealed to residents when attending the press conference to take part in the contest to share the happiness of having panda citizens.
The SAR government has previously announced that it will spend 80 million patacas (10 million U.S. dollars) on the construction of a facility that will house the panda pair, and the project was expected to be completed in September this year. Enditem
