Xiao Qiang
Every 40 years or so, five major planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) form a single line in the sky. In ancient China, people believed that this phenomenon signaled the imminent arrival of a major, and usually unfortunate, event. Last weekend, a joke circulated on the Chinese blogosphere: When five major state-run newspapers run identical front pages, what does it portend?The answer is: the 17th Communist Party Congress, a meeting held once every five years and slated for October.
Well, did you ever: what a swell Party this is. We’ve got another alignment, too. The run up to the Olympics and the associated compulsory happy news diktat.
Of course, what that means is that every foreign hack assigned to the country over the next year or so is going to try and tweak a few noses and make his or her bones. There’s a school of argument that goes that China will now be subjected to unprecedented scrutiny, but I’m not sure that it’ll work out that way. If you put a blanket ban on anything likely to be interesting it tends to equalize the value of everything being banned. All you really need to do is get hold of a good gotcha and the easiest ones to get will be the most trivial. You can get away with a lot of stuff under cover of that kind of journalism.
Relatedly, a good but rather ill edited article on China and the Olympics by Li Datong.
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