Congratulations to the CCP

Among those congratulating the Chinese Communist Party on reaching the grand old age of 90 years old was one Boris Gryzlov, who remarked that the CCP had ” weathered war flames and various hardships and led the Chinese people on the road toward peace and prosperity”.  Conicidentally, he’s also the very same Boris Gryzlov who was quoted in Time  saying “Parliament isn’t a place for political discussions”.  He’s also the same Boris Gryzlov who defended electoral violations in the 2007 Russian election by saying “They in no way put in doubt the final result. The fact that these violations have been registered shows that we have a transparent ballot.”

Mwai Kibaki sent in his congratulations, and he should know all about poltical reform since he was…er… accused of electoral fraud in the 2007/8 Kenyan elections.  The Independent Reviews Commission noted that during the Kenyan elections ” there were too many electoral malpractices from several regions perpetrated by all the contesting parties to conclusively establish which candidate won the December 2007 Presidential elections. Such malpractices included widespread bribery, vote buying, intimidation and ballot-stuffing by both sides, as well as incompetence from the Electoral Commission of Kenya”.  The head of a local democracy watchdog,  the Institute of Education in Democracy, said on the day of Kibaki’s swearing-ine that “This is the saddest day in the history of democracy in this country. It is a coup d’etat,”

Projects that were supposed to highlight the technical achievements of the CCP completed in time for the celebrations have included:

• A new high speed rail link connecting Beijing and Shanghai which has suffered three malfunctions in two days that resulted in scores of late arrivals.  When asked if the trains used any Japanese technology, Wang Yong Ping, the spokesman for China’s Ministry of Railways scoffed at the suggestion, saying  “the Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway and Japan’s Shinkansen can’t even be raised in the same breath, because many of the technologies employed by China’s high-speed rail are far superior to those used in Japan’s Shinkansen.”

• Another flagship construction project was a new road in Kunming that promptly collapsed down the cliff that it was built on a mere day and a half after it was “completed” killing two people and injuring ten others.

• Finally, the chief engineer, Shao Xin Peng, has reassured everyone (including the BBC ) that the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge is safe for traffic.  Construction workers had told CCTV that the bridge was at least 2 months away from being completed, and reporters found missing bolts, missing safety barriers and even missing lighting.  Thankfully Xin Peng pointed out that “The status of secondary features does not affect the main project or the opening of the bridge.”  So that’s all right then.  Locals have pointed out that the  $US2.3 billion bridge has resulted in only a 10 minute reduction in travel time – compared to the highway that runs parallel to it -and  thanks to the fact that there are only 3 toll booths installed, a 1.5 hour journey is now compressed into a 3 hour wait in the queue at the exit of the bridge.

CCTV’s Greatest Hits

Rare is the day that CCTV contains actual news about China, the editorial staff at the station routinely concoct fake stories, use fake footage (sometimes culled from Hollywood movies) and use fake people to keep everyone happy and safe in the knowledge that they living in a socialist paradise.  Here’s a run-down of some the worst news gathering not seen since…well…ever, really.

Top Gun

Not happy with the use of actual real news footage, CCTV spliced in a scene of a missile destroying a plane.  The video was posted on the myriad thousand video sharing sites around China, along with various, non-too-complimentary comments.  The Wall Street Journal reported that the video might have actually been part of the promotional materials used by a jet manufacturer.

Taking a leaf from the Chinese Book of Effective PR, a spokesman promptly denied that they used the footage to beef up its advertising.  “It’s impossible and unnecessary for us to do anything like that,” Ding Zhiyong, AVIC’s director of public relations, told China Real Time, “The J-10 is an accomplishment we’re proud of–why would we even need to use ‘Top Gun’ footage?”.  Thankfully, once the tweets had hit the fan in the Chinese blogosphere, no one at CCTV was available for comment because of the Chinese New Year, and the story blew over quite conveniently.

The $12 Apartment

For anyone who has lived in Beijing, the housing market is something that weigh s heavily on the mind.  Contracts are often worth more than the paper they’re hurriedly printed on, landlords greed can often mean that people are thrown out of their houses with a few days to find a new place to live because the landlord is selling the place, and the government is trying to contain a rapidly expanding property bubble.

One of the misguided efforts that the CCP made was to stage an interview with a Beijing resident claiming that the apartment in which she lived had a monthly rent of a mere 77RMB for a princely 45 square meter pad (to compare, this author’s apartment in Chongwenmen is 3300RMB per month for 68 square meters).  Hu Jin Tao replied that the glorious Chinese Communist Party was doing everything it could to help people on low incomes live, well, like they weren’t on a low income, proclaiming “The party and the government pay great attention on improving people’s livelihood. Now we’ve adopted series of measures, and more are expected to come to improve lives of low-income families.”

Internet users were not happy, and soon uncovered a series of photos that showed the esteemed apartment owner, Mrs. Guo and her daughter taking not-so-low-income jollies to places like Shanghai, Dalian and Xiamen.  The broadcast ultimately backfired, deepened the discontent within the Chinese middle classes who have had to cope with increasingly high rents.  The problem got so bad that the government ordered the story and comments to be scrubbed from all discussion forums and social network sites.

Google Porn

The Chinese government is very proud of the fact that it has a clean and harmonious Internet environment.  Yes, in a country of 1.3 billion people, it’s forbidden to look at porn, and of course, the CCP Propaganda Department is anxious not only to establish itself as the thin red line, but also point out that looking at porn on the Internet is worse than eating babies in church, or drowning bag loads of kittens in the Yangtze.  To wit, the CCTV “current affairs show”, Focus Interview, broadcast an interview with a student who was addicted to looking at X-rated imaged on the web.  In a delicious twist, the interviewee pointed out that most of the images were to be found on the Chinese governments favorite search engine, Google.

Chinese netizens – all 300 million of them – were unimpressed and just a little skeptical of the claims.  A little searching around (probably using Google) uncovered the evil plot – Gao Ye, the student being interviewed was actually one of Focus Interviews’s own interns.  The Internet monitors in Beijing promptly added the words “Gao Ye” to their keyword blacklists, which in turn managed to grind the most of the Chinese Internet traffic to a halt since “gao” means “tall” and “ye” means “also”.

BTCC Spring Festival Fire

Ove the Spring Festival in 2009, a fireworks display went out of control and turned the Beijing Television Cultural Center in a massive roman candle that could be seen for miles around.  In the ensuing investigation, it was discovered that officials at CCTV had authorized the display, but hadn’t applied for permits from the local Beijing government, not only that, but they had ignored repeated warnings from the police  that the fireworks would be too powerful and dangerous.  As it turned out the fireworks were too dangerous (who would’ve guessed?) and the resulting inferno raged for 5 hours, killed one firefighter and completely destroyed the $731 million building.

Arrests immediately followed, including the former head of CCTV’s construction bureau, 50-year-old Xu We.  Attempts to clamp down on the news story also followed, resulting in a wave of criticism from Chinese netizens and the international press. In a leaked memo to the New York Times, Beijing authorities had apparently ordered “No photos, no video clips, no in-depth reports…the news should be put on news areas only and the comments posting areas should be closed”.  The reason?  The fire was said to symbolize bad luck for the coming New Year.

James Fallows, of The Atlantic wrote, “that the perils of the fireworks and firecrackers are more than a joke…. that people responsible appear to have been CCTV employees; and that the whole subsequent matter of investigating, publicizing, making sense of, and drawing omens from an unignorable spectacle involving the country’s leading propaganda/communication outlet and the city’s most distinctive new landmark will say a lot about the emotional and political state of China right now.”

Spring Festival Utility Men

And finally, the epic CCTV Spring Festival Gala raised it’s ugly head once again earlier this month, and while it’s becoming less and less popular, and turning into more of three hour infomercial, more fun can be had spotting people in the audience.  While typically, the sponsors of the show will have their CEO’s given the best seats, it’s the “ordinary people” – carefully vetted members of the public and “utility men” that netizens have the most fun with.

Yes, although CCTV has had the bright idea of using actors as fake members of the public, they haven’t really thought the whole thing through, and have used the same actors in the same shows for, er, the past 10 years.  One can only assume that they’ve been hoping that no one will catch on.  The bad news is of course that, well, people caught on.  And so did a lot of western news sources. Chinese netizens helpfully posted screen grabs of the utility men in a series of photos going all the way back to 2001.

Chinese Internet to Be Turned Off?

Image via CrunchBase

Bao Zhong, top scientist, economist and China’s foremost Internet expert said at the opening ceremony that was held in a MacDonalds on Beijing’s famous Wang Fu Jing shopping street, “There comes a time when you’ve got to start thinking about saying ‘let’s just turn the bastard thing off it’s more trouble than it’s worth’. There’s no evidence to suggest that the Chinese people are any good at doing stuff on the ‘net – just look at Youku, Yupoo, Kaixin and all the other websites that we’ve ripped off from the US. We can’t sustain this level blatant plagiarism for much longer.”

The committee was convened after Skype was deemed illegal in China, forcing users to subscribe to only state owned companies for telecommunication services.

When pressed for comment, a Conservative party spokesman from the British Ministry of Facebook and Twittering said “we’re already making money from paying Chinese workers a pittance an hour to assemble a wide range of goods used by British companies. Why do they need to use Skype anyway? I can’t understand a bloody word anyone says over there, can you?”

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