Beijing Newspeak

I fear this post will be illogical and completely lacking in a central theme as befits a polisher who is not so much losing his marbles as seeing them crushed into powder under the weight of pre-Congress propaganda and who is becoming bored, in a petulant kind of way, with harmonizing the content of his blog. Spare a thought, though, for those souls who are actually required to write articles under the headline of “Chinese people proud of nation’s development” rather than just tossing a few commas into the mix. What, you want the link for that one? Gluttons.

Of course, it could be a lot worse. Luckily, I have had nothing to do with the Special Olympics coverage. One reporter saw a great opportunity to link a volleyball game featuring the German Unified Volleyball Team (I had no idea we still have to make that kind of clarification) to the buzzword of the upcoming Party Congress through the headline, “German team shows harmony, though loses match”.

It seems the Zimbabwean team’s efforts are receiving a decent dollop of coverage on the Xinhua wire, some of which has been snapped up by Mugabe’s pet publication The Herald to complement the stories filed by its own correspondent.  Xinhua’s stories probably won’t go too far to softening the blow of China’s move away from Mugabe’s regime but The Herald is unrivalled in its snide remarks anyway:

Clothes for the Special Olympic Zimbabwe team were tailor-made for the grand official opening ceremony and it was a refreshing sight from some nations which wore tracksuits.

Material for the attire was sourced through the Harare Mayor’s Christmas Cheer Fund where SOZ where one of the charities which benefited to the tune of $20 million.

The money was then used to purchase cloth and a top-up was made for the tailors to come up with the attire. Sentiment among some people here had been that Zimbabwe would not be able to send a team due to the negative publicity the country has been subjected to by some international media organisations.

But to their surprise the nation has managed to field a decent number of athletes for golf, bocce, swimming and track and field.

China hosting the Special Olympics is of course a very good thing but improving awareness of people with intellectual disabilities within the country is largely down to the media. Some of the stories I have seen that have been translated into English have been so naive they don’t really help anybody. For example (an unfortunate use of quotation marks around the word “stars” it seems):

Five intellectually disabled players from the British delegation attending the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games had their birthday party Thursday at Wugong Hotel in Shanghai.

“I am so excited now. I just want to say ‘thank you’,” 20-year-old tennis player Thomas William Styles said, eating a birthday cake.

“It’s my birthday today, and it will be a wonderful memory in my whole life,” Styles said. “I want to call my parents now and share with them my pleasure.”

“Happy birthday to you.” The delegation members sang and danced.

The five “stars” lit candles, cut the birthday cake, received gifts and expressed their gratefulness to others.

Another event in which I will not be involved in the dissemination process is the Party Congress. This leaves me with plenty of time to keep up with the latest analysis on China Media Project, which is providing superb insight. Personally I can’t get enough of the intricasies of Party speak - something that can be lost in translation in Xinhua’s English versions - and it’s all here, courtesy of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre in Hong Kong. Of course, we can keep up with the breaking news through the website of the 17th National Congress Press Center, on which the government clearly disproves theories that it doesn’t do all it can to assist the foreign media with the following advice for correspondents:

In Beijing, it becomes colder in October. For the large temperature differences between day and night in this season, we would like to remind you of taking a coat with you when working outside so as to avoid catching cold.

Nice. On a related note, I expect the homepage of  the Communist Party news website will be updated shortly, seeing as it still has a picture of Huang Ju among its bigwigs.

One story that did stir a modicum of interest in me in recent days was this piece about the number of new Communist Party members in the last five years. According to the CPC’s Organization Department, the Party took 13.16 million new members under its wing and the total now stands at 73.36 million. However, out of 19.6 million applicants only 134,000 came from the “new social stratum” - 0.68 percent. And out of them, only 64,000 “are likely to join the Party soon”. The idea of a “new social stratum” was put forward officially by Jiang Zemin in 2001 to add to the five strata of farmer, worker, intellectual, cadre and soldier. It consists of “private entrepreneurs, technicians, managerial-level staff in private or foreign-funded companies, the self-employed and employees in intermediate organizations”, according to Xinhua. Xinhua journalists are classed as intellectuals but one joked that I was from the “new social stratum” because I earned lots of money. Great dig.

It has long been accepted that many people join the Party out of convenience - to rise up the ranks more smoothly - or to please their Party-member families. Clearly members of the so-called new social stratum, a section of society that will continue to balloon over the next few years and which contains some of the country’s richest people, do not feel Party membership is of particular benefit. Nor is the CPC rushing to snap them up.

Right, I’m off to stare in wonderment at the latest anti-Dalai Lama tirade …