Shut Out of Party Congress and Power Transfer, Chinese Citizens Turn to Humor

After Thursday's theatrical opening in Beijing of the 18th Communist Party Congress, the real action shifted today to behind-the-scenes meetings among kingmakers who will hammer out the deals that decide China's new leadership. Traditionally, these meetings have taken place in private locations, including hotels like the Xiyuan and the Capital, where delegates are staying.

This horse-trading has been going on for months, of course, but now the pressure is really on. If you're interested how the process works, this Associated Press report spells it out.

For ordinary Chinese, the meetings may as well be happening on Mars. Neither Chinese nor foreign reporters are allowed in the hotels and while some door-stepping in the past has been possible, this year the South China Morning Post reported that military members of the congress (who form the single largest interest group at 251 of 2,268 delegates), have been warned not to give impromptu interviews to the media.

Coverage in the state media, meanwhile, consists of bland expressions of joy and admiration. For a sense of that, check out these unforgettable photos from the China Daily that show people around the country gazing raptly at the show in Beijing.

Yet China's citizens are a savvy lot. From taxi drivers to professors, many care deeply about what's happening and have turned to humor to deal with their frustration at the gap between what they want to know and what the government wants them to know. It's a subversive, bitter humor that is often cynical rather than laugh-out-loud funny.

Take this joke, circulating this week on China's microblogs, known as Weibo (it has since been censored so I reproduce it here in text):

“Yesterday Obama said to me: ‘Hey, bro', you're only starting your power changeover tomorrow, we had ours today!' I shot him a look and said: ‘What damn changeover, don't you get it!' Kim Jong-un was standing next to us li stening and said: ‘What's a power changeover? When someone dies?'”

Or this one, posted last Sunday and still up on Friday noon in Beijing, on the Weibo site of a user with the online handle The Emperor is Not Dead (in Chinese).

Xiao Li wants to emigrate to the United States. His leader asked him, “Aren't you happy with your salary?”
Xiao Li said, “I'm happy.”
“Unhappy with your living conditions?”
“Happy too.”
“Unhappy about the online situation?”
“Also happy.”
“Health care, education, are you happy?”
“Happy with all of it!”
“Then why do you want to emigrate to the U.S.?”
“Because you're allowed to be unhappy there!”

Inevitably, perhaps, Gangnam Style, the K-Pop video by Psy that is approaching 700 million views on You Tube, has hit the congress - this time in the form of a parody by Tibetans living in exile who prance about with a flag an d a giant-headed Xi Jinping, tapped to assume the top party post next week.

Chinese officials can be their own worst enemies. Seven Tibetans have set fire to themselves this week so far to protest Chinese rule, Tibetan advocacy groups said, bringing the total of self-immolations to nearly 70.

But in Beijing on Thursday, Qiangba Puncog, the deputy party chief of Tibet, in a bizarre comment, told the South China Morning Post: “I can't say there are no self-immolations in Tibet; however, most Tibetan people and monks didn't burn themselves.” (His comments are behind a paywall here, on the SCMP's interesting congress
blog.)

Also in the SCMP blog, Can Rong, a delegate and party secretary at the China Iron and Steel Research Institute Group, said China wasn't “psychologically prepared” for officials to disclose their personal fortunes, though he said he agreed they should, eventually. Such transparency in one of the major demands of the public here, w ith corruption and ill-gotten hidden income the number one hot button issue.

“In the long term, this should be the way to go. But in the short
term, we don't have enough psychological and technical preparation for it. The whole society, including the masses and the officials, is not ready yet,” Mr. Can said.

There was a sting in his comments, though: “The publication should be from the top down,” meaning that top officials (like Wen Jiabao, the premier, or Xi Jinping, the likely next president), should publish their accounting first.

With the very term “shiba da,” or “eighteenth big' (shorthand for the congress) widely censored online, netizens have turned to ironic references such as comparing China today to Sparta, a tough and militaristic state in ancient Greece. In Chinese, “sibada,” or Sparta, sounds almost identical to “shiba da,” so the parallel works. This scary image from the movie, Sparta, was making the rounds and is now cached on the Web site of the U.S.-based China Digital News. Note the subtitle, which says: “This is Shiba da!”

Then there's the China Daily Show, a savagely satirical fake-news Website whose name plays off the state-run China Daily and The Daily Show in the United States.

In this story, a fictitious Beijing-based Western newspaper correspondent admits that he hasn't a clue what's really going on in the congress' secret meetings: “Neither he nor any of his colleagues had any notion about what is actually happening behind the walled compounds of Zhongnanhai and Beidahe, where the key decisions are usually made about the upcoming leadership transition.” (Some of the language might offend, so you'll have to Google it yourself.)

The frustration of being kept in the dark is shared by many Chinese. In this cartoon, posted by an anonymous Chinese cartoonist and picked up by the China Digital Times, we see starkly the contrast between the noise of the U.S. Presidential elections and the deafening silence of China's power transfer.