We weren’t going to write about the anti-corruption campaign this week, really we weren’t. To begin with even the verbiage is becoming stifling. The word “probe” is already beginning to conjure up visions of Party officials gleefully brandishing a gleaming medical instrument over the heads of Chrysler and Daimler executives. “Bad Mercedes-Benz, bad,” they say. “Price fixing bad!” Cue demented laughter – or is that the manic laughter of foreign journalists who have been poring over thesauruses searching for synonyms all week? Probing for synonyms, one might say…oh, sorry. After a while it becomes a neurosis – probe probe probe probe probe probe, and now it looks like Japanese. Sorry, it’s been a long day.
Anti-corruption “drive” isn’t much better – it somehow brings to mind Xi Jinping galloping over the plains of Xinjiang rounding up a herd of half-wild Mongolian cattle. Actually that may soon become a reality if China sticks to its guns and prohibits the import of US meat produced with feed additives. You know it’s time to admit you have some food safety issues when even China doesn’t want your pork.
But we digress. With all the probing and driving going on these days CER has decided to give “campaign” the editorial stamp of approval. Sure, it has its upsides. It’s elegant, refined almost, and reminds us of that word that starts with a “d” where people go head-to-head every few years for the honor of representing a bunch of people who don’t understand the first thing about any of their policies. Oh, and where it’s not so cool to threaten companies for attempting to seek legal representation, or so says the European Chamber of Commerce. We wouldn’t know.
So it’s safe to say campaign has some baggage. That’s why our all-around favorite synonym is “crackdown.” It’s trendy and has a kind of pop to it. It also rhymes with smackdown. We don’t know why, but we feel like that could be useful. These days it seems like there’s always a smackdown waiting to happen in Beijing.
For now we’ve got our money on the 150 economic fugitives at large in the US. Apparently there have been some misunderstandings between Chinese regulators and US judicial authorities. “They always think Chinese judicial organs violate suspects’ human rights,” Wang Gang, a senior official at the International Cooperation Bureau, told the China Daily completely un-ironically, according to sources.
He went on to say Chinese authorities were simply worried about the possibility of said fugitives consuming feed additive-laden pork.
But it’s Friday and all this talk about pork and corruption is getting a little heavy. MOFCOM officials seem to agree. “For the one hundredth time,” spokesman Shen Danyang told Xinhua. “Looking back at the past six years after the anti-monopoly law took effect, both domestic and foreign firms have been probed according to the law.”
We give up. Really, we just give up. Please can we go back to talking about consumer inflation and monetary loosening again? Anything to avoid these probing questions.