President Hu Jintao has a message for Chinese who are greedy, lazy or unpatriotic: Be ashamed, be very ashamed. Hu’s list of eight do’s and don’t’s was unveiled during the meeting of parliament that ended this week. It aims to douse the excesses of China’s 27-year-long economic boom with a bucket of cold virtue.On Wednesday, the aphorisms were issued on a $1 poster with plain, black Chinese characters above a photo of the Great Wall. Hu’s virtues are blandly apolitical, with none of the radical vigor of founding communist leader Mao Zedong, who declared: “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.”
Via Peking Duck, which gives the list in full:
Love, do not harm the motherland.
Serve, don’t disserve the people.
Uphold science; don’t be ignorant & unenlightened.
Work hard; don’t be lazy and hate work.
Be united and help each other; don’t gain benefits at the expense of others.
Be honest and trustworthy, not profit-mongering at the expense of your values.
Be disciplined and law-abiding instead of chaotic and lawless.
Know plain living and hard struggle, do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures.
Well dib dib dib and waggle me woggle. These are apparently traditional Chinese virtues. They remind me a bit of low church methodist hymns. And that made me think of Norman Lewis’ account of Liberia under the rule of William VS (for Vacanarat Shadrach) Tubman, which was one of the world’s odder political hybrids: a sort of Methodist capitalist dictatorship. Lewis reproduces an example of the regime’s propaganda, which actually was set to the tune of a low Church Methodist hymn:
Tubman bids us toil at the nation’s plan,
With the lone star banner building every clan
As he ever trusts us we must work,
So in your small corner don’t shirk and lurk!
Tubman bids us toil in the gleeful way,
Saving every moment of the precious day,
Whether big or little we must work,
So in your small corner don’t shirk and lurk!
Well that’s quite enough of that. I suppose in a Chinese context this is a reprise of Lei Feng propaganda, the spirit of the rustless screw. But the problem there is that it’s not done in the name of the revolution and therefore can’t promise to elevate the worthy drudges with a slam-bang transcendental experience at the end of all their drudgery. By contrast, you need to prove the point that virtue is it’s own reward by handing over some goodies, the sooner the better. Or else, people ask themselves, why bother? One take on the paradox of thrift, I suppose.
Nonetheless I am happy to confirm that I've never disserved the people.
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