China’s annual legislative meetings, known as the lianghui, have been underway in Beijing for the past week. While the big decisions typically get made by a small circle of top leaders behind closed doors, the meetings also provide a venue for delegates from across China to contribute their ideas on charting the country’s development – and each year, a few delegates raise some ideas that are decidedly outside the box.
Here are five proposals that grabbed China Real Time’s attention this time around.
1) Girls should begin their schooling earlier than boys. Young boys in China are too active to sit down and study, argues one delegate to China’s political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. His solution? Let boys start elementary school at 8 years old instead of 6 as currently mandated.
“Boys are weak in exams, and it affects their self-confidence over the long-term,” said the delegate, Zhu Xiaojin, who is also vice president of Nanjing Normal University. Letting boys play as much as they want until age 8 is a helpful way of letting them develop their intelligence and avoid them “losing at the starting line,” Mr. Zhu argued. He didn’t elaborate on how this would help address the problem of boys’ perceived academic weakness.
“This is not gender discrimination; I myself went to school at six-and-a-half years old. … There were many outstanding talented girls around me. I felt depressed when I was compared with them,” the Modern Express Newspaper, a Jiangsu-based newspaper belonging to China’s official Xinhua News Agency, cited Mr. Zhu as saying.
2) Smog tax. Another CPPCC member, Xu Jiankang, has proposed a “smog tax” on gasoline to encourage the use of new-energy vehicles. According to Mr. Xu, big cities should impose a fee on vehicle owners because automobile exhaust is a significant contributor to air pollution.
However, according to the Communist Party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily newspaper, Mr. Xu didn’t give further details on his proposed tax. He also didn’t mention whether he would impose a tax on major polluting enterprises, such as chemical engineering factories, refineries, construction companies and the coal industry.
Chinese Internet users were far from impressed with the proposal, with many writing on the Weibo social media platform that the government should focus its efforts on cleaning up smog rather than charging ordinary people.
3) Bye bye, billboards. He Bingqin, a member of Jiangxi province’s NPC delegation,suggests doing battle against that menace of China’s roadways — billboards. Mr. He reasons that since billboards typically use colorful and crazy words or language, they could distract drivers and lead to traffic accidents, so all roadside ads should be eliminated.
He doesn’t give any specific examples; instead, he writes that one second of a driver’s attention spent looking at billboards is a second that could bring on disaster. He concludes that transportation authorities shouldn’t just pay attention to the economic benefits of billboards but also more seriously consider their effects on drivers’ safety.
4) Hello, “anti-Japanese spirit.” Relations between Beijing and Tokyo may have thawed over the past year, but anti-Japanese sentiment in China remains strong, with nationalistic World War II dramas a staple of Chinese television.
Professor Yan Chengzhong, a member of Shanghai’s delegation to the National People’s Congress, wants to take things one step further: In his proposal, Mr. Yan argues that anti-Japanese cultural works should focus not just on modern history but also on China’s Ming and Qing dynasties — going back some 500 years — in order to further boost the public’s understanding of Sino-Japanese relations.
“Cultural works focusing on earlier history could have educational meaning to not only Chinese, but also to all Asian countries that were attacked by the Japanese,” Mr. Yan said in his proposal. “Even more, it could be helpful to the younger generation in Japan.”
Mr. Yan noted that in the 1550s, for instance, a Ming Dynasty hero named Qi Jiguang led forces in eastern Fujian province to defend China’s coastal regions from raids by the Japanese, in an episode that is still commemorated with an annual festival in parts of the province.
While ubiquitous on Chinese television, World War II dramas are often criticized by viewers as being too dramatic to be believable; typical scenes include Chinese soldiers tearing their Japanese foes to bits with their bare hands and farmers using stones to knock down Japanese military aircraft. With the release of Mr. Yan’s proposal, some Chinese Internet users have wondered: Will these crazy plotlines now be extended to China’s Ming and Qing Dynasty?
5) No cat or dog meat at markets. Zheng Xiaohe, an NPC delegate from Anhui province, suggests prohibiting cats and dogs – as well as cat and dog meat – from entering China’s food markets. Yet it’s unlikely the proposal will go down well in some parts of the country.
In northeastern and southern China, eating dog meat is a long-held tradition. Yulin, a city in China’s southern Guangxi region, continues to hold a dog meat festival every June – and while animal-rights campaigners protest it every time, it’s hard to see the tradition changing anytime soon.
Chinese lawmakers have drafted an Animal Protection Law and have been collecting opinions on it since 2010. But there is still no timetable for when it could become law. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/10/five-surprising-proposals-at-chinas-legislative-meetings/
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