Excessive banners simply send the wrong message

Editor's note: Some grassroots civil servants from Jiangsu province told the Xinhua Daily Telegraph that almost every government department requires them to hang banners on public sites, and that there are not enough lamp posts and railings along the main roads on which to hang the slogans in some small cities. China Daily reporter Li Yang comments:

Not only the people in charge of hanging the banners, but also the people who are the intended audience for the messages feel that the "banner publicity" has gone too far and is turning public sites into bulletin boards for individual government departments.

Worse, there are some miswritten characters in the slogans, and banners, whose messages are far away from each other. For example, family planning and the crackdown on organized crimes are juxtaposed, causing undesirable intertextual interpretations that go against the original intentions of the departments concerned.