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October 30, 2015

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Video puts fun spin on economic planning

Program Code: 0909346151005005

A chirpy theme song complete with an animated music video explaining China's 13th Five-Year Plan has gone viral on the Internet.

In the slickly produced 3-minute video, four cartoon characters travel through a mint-green and fuchsia dreamscape atop lily pads, China’s Great Wall and a Volkswagen bus.

“If you wanna know what China’s gonna do, best pay attention to the shisanwu,” they sing in the chorus, using the Chinese words for “13-five,” an abbreviation for the forthcoming blueprint.

A rubber duck, disembodied lips, a mix-tape, a disco ball and Albert Einstein all make appearances in the video, as do mannequins sporting light bulb and teddy bear heads.

Released in English with Chinese subtitles, the song’s rhyming lyrics showcase an uncharacteristically tongue-in-cheek humour.

Among the contributors to the plan, it said: “There’s doctors, bankers and farmers, too, and even engineers who deal with poo!”

A cartoon David Bowie lookalike sits atop a dinosaur, rhyming colloquially: “Every five years in China, man, they make a new development plan.”

The video is attributed to the mysterious Fuxinglushang Animation Studio, which has a history of producing glossy clips aimed at foreign audiences.

Little is known about Fuxinglushang, which could either mean “the road to rejuvenation” in Chinese, or be an indirect reference to a street in Beijing where state broadcaster China Central Television has an office.

A promotional video it made on the “Chinese Dream” — President Xi Jinping’s catchphrase — depicted an “ancient and youthful country.”

The people depicted in the video hoped for “a pretty wife” and “bluer skies,” while clowns on scooters handed out roses to smiling young women.

It concluded: “The Communist Party of China is with you along the way.”




 

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