Green Lives

My daughter took these photographs this July in Beijing.

Even the Chinese?!

It's almost enough to make you regret the passing of Mao. Classical Values quoting the WSJ.

SHANGHAI -- Next month, China will ring in the Year of the Pig. Nestlé SA planned to celebrate with TV ads featuring a smiling cartoon pig. "Happy new pig year," the ads said.

This week, China Central Television, the national state-run TV network, banned Nestlé's ad -- and all images and spoken references to the animal in commercials, including those tied to the Lunar New Year, China's biggest holiday.

The intent: to avoid offending Muslims, who consider pigs unclean. "China is a multiethnic country," the network's ad department said in a notice sent to ad agencies late Tuesday. "To show respect to Islam, and upon guidance from higher levels of the government, CCTV will keep any 'pig' images off the TV screen."

Why is it that this makes me smile, but if it concerned a European country, I'd be livid? I love that "guidance".

Plus ça change

When people blather about ending American, or Western hegemony, they always leave it to be inferred that what will follow will be equality and justice between the nations. Harmony, Confucianistically speaking. Why this should happen, I have no idea. What will happen is that hegemony will pass to others, such as a China agressively selling its model of authoritarian development. In a nice non-imperialistic way, of course.

Internationally, 'harmony' is supposed to mean the opposite of Bush-style unilateralism. But it is just rhetoric. Beijing is aggressively trying to subjugate Burma, Laos and other client states, and its behaviour in Sudan is certainly not Confucianist, only creating 'harmony' for the murderous dictators there.

Harmony is a musical term and has little relevance outside music. The analogous political term is 'domination', accepted or otherwise.