Finding inspiration amid tedium
Being a journalist in China, it is always a challenging and exhausting experience to cover the "Lianghui", or "Two Meetings", as people call the NPC and CPPCC sessions.
It can be tedious. The two meetings last more than 10 days, and you can rarely find page-turners in would-be government policies.
But dig deeper it can be extremely exciting. You are able to observe how democracy functions in this nation and how social programs develop from a several-page proposal.
Actually, my favorite part of covering the "Two Meetings" is to look through the thousands of proposals. The NPC and the CPPCC both have small rooms where proposals are catalogued and piled up and journalists are crammed to the hilt. You have to fight for a space on the table and a seat is a luxury available only at mealtime.
This year the proposals are much more interesting than last year as the "Two Meetings" shift focus more from economic development to social harmony.
And journalists, despite our competitive nature, cannot help discussing the proposals among ourselves and we often joke about voting for "the 10 best proposals in journalists' eyes" and then perhaps the 10 worst.
Let's take the CPPCC proposals as an example. They are mostly based on sound research, and even the most hardened journalists are impressed when reading those produced by those grass-roots participants with insightful revelations about issues that need to be seriously addressed.
For example, a proposal given by five university professors in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, pointed out that the Hanjiang River running by the city, has been polluted to a degree that it could hardly be the starting point of the central route of the highly touted South-to-North Water Diversion Project as planned.
In another proposal, a member from North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region raised the issue that the "Three North" protection forest project, which started in the 1970s, is being "given up halfway" amid the pursuit of economic development in the nation's ambitious western development plan.
However, some proposals are a little left of center.
For example, a CPPCC member suggested that the media should be "strictly controlled" when reporting stories about major crimes and extramarital affairs. Newspaper and magazines are deteriorating public morals by talking about these negative sides of the society, he said.
Another member proposed that the birthday of Mencius' mother be made the "Chinese Mother's Day". The mother of the 4th-century BCE Confucian philosopher was known for investing heavily in her son's education.
(China Daily 03/06/2007 page6)
