China’s annual legislative meetings, which ended Monday with the traditional press conference by the premier, were generally short on surprises. They did, however, produce more than the usual serving of eyebrow-raising proposals and public utterances.
As in most authoritarian countries, important policy decisions in China are made by the political elite behind closed doors. But in a nod to democracy, delegates to the plenary sessions of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress–and its advisory body, the China People’s Political Consultative Congress, which meets alongside the NPC–are allowed to propose laws and regulations, make policy recommendations and generally hold forth on pet topics to the nation’s press.
For many in China, these proposals and commentaries are the saving grace of the meetings–the single consolation prize for sitting through ten days of pro forma speechifying, soporific press events and endless newspaper editorials fawning over the latest Five Year Plan.
Despite, or perhaps because of, China’s rigid policy-making process, these proposals have a tendency to wander into the absurd, with some of the more extreme examples rivaling zen koans in their ability to stop logical analysis dead in its tracks.
This year, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency, NPC delegates alone submitted 560 bills, plus an additional 2,960 suggestions and recommendations.
Among the most attention-getting of those was a drastic (if arguably well-intentioned) proposal from NPC delegate and China National Radio anchor Fang Ming to ban advertising on CCTV-1, the country’s flagship state-run TV network, and on local flagship networks throughout the country to “prevent commercial interests from leading media around by the nose.” By way of a model, Ms. Fang cited (in Chinese) Chongqing Satellite TV, which has recently gone “red,” removing all commercials and running a steady stream of “public interest” programming – to highly mixed reviews.
Although she didn’t submit a formal bill, CPPCC delegate Liang Bei managed to outdo Ms. Fang in attracting attention to her own pet solution to one of China’s most intractable problems. Addressing the difficulties many young urban couples face when trying to cope with the country’s skyrocketing property prices, Ms. Liang, the director of the Real Estate Research Center at Beijing’s University of International Business and Economics, suggested 20-something women whose boyfriends can’t afford a house should ditch their partners in favor of 40-something men who can afford one. “If they have the means,” she went on (in Chinese), 20-something men “can then wait until they’re 40 and marry a 20 year-old.”
The undisputed winner of this year’s “shocking proposal” (雷人提案) crown, however, was CPPCC delegate Wang Ping, director of the China Ethnic Culture Park (infamously translated on a Beijing street sign as “Racist Park” before a 2008 Olympics Chinglish rectification campaign). Concerned with the effects of urbanization on “5,000 years” of rural Chinese culture, Ms. Wang suggested rural children be discouraged from attending university, “because as soon as rural kids start studying, they won’t go back to their ancestral homes, which is a tragedy.”
Keeping rural kids on the farm, Ms. Wang argued (in Chinese ), would also help rural families avoid the financial burden of paying for college and alleviate chronic unemployment among recent college graduates.
Ms. Wang’s idea for dealing with the very real problems associated with China’s mass migration out of the countryside attracted tens of thousands of comments online. While some were sympathetic, the vast majority took the museum director to task for her classist insensitivity to the dreams of rural Chinese.
“On what basis can you say rural kids have to farm the land while city people get to sit in an office drinking and eating,” a reader from Anhui Province wrote on the popular Sina web portal. Another reader suggested a return to the Cultural Revolution, when privileged urban children were “sent down” to the countryside to learn from farmers: “Wouldn’t this also help preserve China’s 5,000 year-old history?”
Finding and noting the year’s most astounding proposal has become something of an unofficial contest for members of the Chinese news media. One top Sina news editor admitted recently on his microblog that he’d dreamed “for many years” of setting up a page on the news portal where readers could nominate and vote for their favorites. But the contest can sometimes get out of hand, as appears to have happened with Zhang Huijun, dean of the Beijing Film Academy.
According to several reports, Mr. Zhang, a CPPCC delegate, proposed new rules that would regulate the amount of blood and number of explosions allowed to be shown in Chinese movies and also ban on-screen depictions of murder, rape and “abnormality” – a list of restrictions that this year’s top grossing Chinese film, “Let the Bullets Fly,” would violate on nearly every count. In a subsequent interview with Phoenix TV (in Chinese), Mr. Zhang said the comments were taken out of context and in way no meant to be taken as a proposal. He said a reporter had asked him whether cigarette smoking should be banned in film and TV and he was trying to argue that bad behavior needed to be regulated in real life first.
Tempting as it may be to interpret all these proposals, real or fake, as a sort of performance art commentary on the Communist Party’s claims to democratic lawmaking, one perennial favorite—a proposal to ban the eating of cats and dogs—actually made it onto the legislative docket as a draft bill in 2010. After a sometimes heated national debate, the bill was eventually killed.
Perhaps our favorite suggestion during this year’s session came from someone who wasn’t a delegate. Science-fiction writer Liu Cixin has suggested that China’s 12th Five Year Plan—discussed during the NPC and approved by delegates Monday—should be amended to include “alien affairs policy research,” Xinhua reported.
“The suggestion might seem far out there, but an alien spaceship might hover right over us over any time soon,” Xinhua quoted Mr. Liu, who may or may not have an unhealthy obsession with last year’s Peter Jackson-produced sci-fi hit “District 9” as saying. “At that time, everything we are worried about, including housing prices, food prices, medical treatment and education, will take a back seat.”
A 47-year-old electrical engineer from the remote city of Yangquan in Shanxi province, whom Xinhua called China’s “top sci-fi writer,” Mr. Liu pointed out that efforts to find extraterrestrial life increased the chances of coming into contact with aliens. “If we really find aliens, which department shall we report to? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the military departments, or some other department?”
Ultimately, Mr. Liu said, it’s a matter of China assuming its rightful place in the world. “China, as a strong country with a long history, is playing an increasingly important role in international affairs, thus, China should take its corresponding responsibilities in interstellar affairs between the beings on earth and other planets.”