WATCH: China’s propaganda now made by laowai for laowai

By Ella Wong, October 28, 2015

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Since last month’s horrendously cringe People’s Daily video of naïve laowai fawning over Xi Dada, it appears that China’s propaganda overlords have seriously stepped up their soft power game (not to mention budget) with a slickly produced, utterly nonsensical animated music video introducing the legislative extravaganza that is the 13th Five-Year Plan, known in Chinese as shisanwu (or 'thirteen five').

“Wanna know what China’s gonna do? Best pay attention to the shisanwu,” the catchy chorus goes – though since the video was clearly the work of foreigners, they mangled the pronunciation and rendered it the “shisan-oooh.”

There’s a lot going on in this video – almost none of which can be explained – but why not allow a cartoon shirtless David Bowie with stars for nipples guide you through the ins and outs of the CCP’s most important economic planning powwow?

No VPN? Watch on Youku here.

So who are the foreigners responsible for this? The credits name Fuxing Road Studio, a mysterious production company with a track record of manufacturing English-language videos designed to make the CCP sound awesome to foreigners. As Quartz notes, the studio “has never introduced itself as a state- or Party-backed production company, or provided credits for its filmmaking crew, but its message is unambiguously pro-Party” and it almost certainly enjoys “some degree of official support.“

We can’t wait for the next one.

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