China:Parliament ridiculed for its fancy proposals · Global Voices
The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the nation's parliament of more than 2,000 delegates, ended in Beijing on 12, March, with pledges to help maintain steady and relatively speedy economic development in 2009. Top national leaders such as <PERSON>, Premier <PERSON> were present at the closing ceremony. (Xinhua)
The conference, according to the ruling Communist Party (CCP), is one of the most important institutions which carry out Chinese-style democracy, that is multiple-party co-operation led by CCP. However, the conference has always been viewed as simply a rubber stamp with its sole purpose being to give endorsement to decisions already made, thus giving semblance of ‘popular’ support for government programs.
However, what is really popular on the internet in China these days is to highlight and satarize some of the most astonishing, impractical and absurd proposals made by the delegates.
Blogger <PERSON> (宋石男） gives a list of such ‘amazing’ proposals on his blog. In the appendix, he notes an interesting news:
本次全国政协会议，给每位委员配发了一台笔记本电脑，以实现无纸化政协会议。据称，这是为了响应国家节能减排的号召，节约纸张和环保.
In the conference, each delegate received a laptop computer containing the order of business to symbolize a paperless office, in response to the government's call to save paper and be more environmentally friendly. 49
The number of delegates who really made it for business, however, is perhaps worthy of a separate debate.
全国政协十一届二次会议副秘书长、民革中央专职副主席修福金认为，本次大会将会期缩短了两天，而且还用电脑替代了原来大量的纸张，这表明从政协开始已经过简朴的生活，开始了艰苦奋斗。
The Vice General Secretary of the conference, also the vice president of one of the eight democratic parties （=decoration ) in China, <PERSON> ( 修福金 ), claimed that the meeting had not only been shortened by 2 days but had also avoided enormous paper consumption by using the computers. It signified that the Consultative Conference, managed in a more frugal style, had slashed its budget and some 5 million RMB allocated for paper use had been saved.
Accordingly, 5 million RMB on paper use will thereby be saved.
However, netizens soon found that the so-called frugal measure actually costs 7.5 million RMB . Some more industrious blogger went even further and calculated how much paper was represented by the 5 million RMB and found that each delegate would have received 36,363 sheets should the 5 million have been spent! Blogger <PERSON> pokes fun of the ambition of ‘saving money’ by saying, “what a paper mountain the conference would have been!”
At a time of global economic downturn, a notable theme of the meeting is to bolster the economy, and the delegates didn't disappoint us taking much care of the issue. But their proposals are sometimes unintentionally ironical and hilarious.
Professor <PERSON> from a university in Shanghai walked into the conference hall, wearing a set of Han clothing, a traditional costume that has a thousand-year history. Along with the somewhat bizarre dressing-up he came up with an even more erratic proposal
穿国服可刺激经济增长
Dressing in the traditional Han clothing would stimulate the economy.
His proposal was named “economic-cultural industry of Chinese traditional clothing”. 49