Society

Can a political campaign ad be hoist by its own petard?

We wrote last week about how “Chinese Professor,” a Hollywood-quality U.S. campaign ad depicting a dystopian future in which China rules the global economy, had raised the bar for China-bashing political messages. Now, after attempting to stifle a parody of the ad, the group that funded it, Citizens Against Government Waste, stands accused of taking a page out of Beijing’s own political handbook.

For those who missed it, the original ad – apparently inspired by a similar Reagan-era spot directed by Ridley Scott – shows a group of Chinese economics students in the year 2030 laughing victoriously as their professor explains how deficit spending and health-care reform doomed the U.S.

In the parody, produced by the liberal group Campus Progress, the subtitles have been altered to deliver a different message.

Chinese media recently reported an alleged conversation between Wang Yinfeng, the Party Secretary of Jiangjin District in Chongqing, and a local property developer. Wang allegedly told the developer to stop the construction of a high-rise residential compound that would tower above the building of the Jiangjin Party Committee once completed. With the new building overshadowing the Party Committee building, Wang said, the latter’s feng shui would be damaged.

The Chinese Communist Party has long dismissed feng shui — the traditional Chinese belief in the connection between the orientation of buildings, interiors and gardens and the fortunes of people living in them — as “feudal superstition,” but in recent years many officials seem to have begun to embrace it. In a number of scandals, local officials have demolished or rebuilt perfectly functioning buildings perceived to have bad feng shui, or constructed useless bridges to create good feng shui.

China's consumer-safety agency, at the urging of U.S. and European officials, plans to tighten product-safety regulations in an effort to stamp out defective and dangerous exports and to ease trade tensions between China and the U.S.

Chinese manufacturers will be held accountable for the safety of their products, said Zhi Shuping, head of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, in a meeting Tuesday with European and U.S. counterparts. The government aims to provide them with safety and testing standards created in cooperation with the U.S. and the European Union. Regulators are particularly eager to rid products of materials containing high levels of caustic metal, such as lead and cadmium.

Beijing officials are mulling limiting the number of cars on city roads in order to ease worsening traffic congestion, according to state media (report in Chinese).

At a forum on urban development, Liu Yumin, deputy director for the Beijing Planning Commission, said, “Traffic problems will not be resolved by gains made in other areas.”

It’s the first time a city official has publicly mentioned plans for limiting the number of automobiles in China’s capital, and could mark a change in gridlock-fighting policy that is tougher than existing programs.