Save water, not the bottles that hold it

Cliched as it may sound a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. Perfectly fitting this description is a photograph on China Daily's website on March 7. The rows of chairs arranged to seat journalists attending the annual session of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing portray order, a trait that has become synonymous with the Chinese government. The objects that complete the photograph are water bottles placed on the vacant chairs in the empty hall - and they tell a story different from order.

When Rene Magritte painted The Treachery of Images (a pipe) and wrote below it, "This is not a pipe", he changed forever the way we see a painting: a painting is just the image of an object rather than the object itself. Going by Magritte's logic (rather philosophy), the water bottles in the photograph on China Daily's website just represented water rather than being water. And this is a stark warning.

The NPC deputies at the annual session have discussed (and will continue to discuss) serious issues among which the environment (or the protection of it) has occupied a high place. President Xi Jinping has even declared that those who destroy the environment or ecology will be punished with an iron hand, and none will be spared.