Letters and Blogs

Welcome the return of parody

Comment on Chen Weihua's column "Parody is a norm of life, accept it"

(China Daily, Dec 27)

It is high time for the parody to reappear in the Chinese media.

In March 1927, after 32 days of inquiry in Hunan province, Mao Zedong wrote a report about the peasant movement.

In upholding the paramount importance of the poor farmers' revolution, he made fun, in an amiable way, of some malapropisms in common use among peasants.

The satirical style contributed a lot to the impact of Mao's historical report.

The great Greek tragedians wrote regularly parodies of their tragedies. Self-irony is a basic component of any earnest self-criticism.

The majority of ordinary people in China will surely understand the difference between a friendly mockery and a hostile one, and will not feel upset by the constructive criticism of some inadequate aspects of their mainstream culture.

The aim of parody, of satires and so on is to improve the form of expression and the profundity of the contents of a cultural message. Be it a simple phrase of the discourse, a work of art, or a news program.

Claudio Cervini

via e-mail

Mao Yushi's ridiculous ideas

The central government always highlights the importance of retaining the minimum of 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) as farmland.

However, Mao Yushi, an economist at Beijing Unirule Institute of Economics, refuted such a policy, saying ensuring the 1.8-billion-mu baseline is wrong and even harmful.

As a large agricultural and populous country, in 2007 and 2008, China harvested 500 million tons of crops. Reducing the baseline as Mao suggested would endanger the Chinese people's food security.

To support his argument, Mao said first of all, the output of food was not directly related with the size of arable land. It was simply ridiculous of him to draw such a conclusion. Without arable land, where can we grow our crops?

Second, Mao said, the world market would provide enough food to avoid food security problems. However, relevant data show that international grain prices have been hitting new highs since the second half of 2006, forcing about 1 billion population in the world to starve this year.

Moreover, if we turn to and rely more on the world market, we will lose pricing power and other influences on it.

Third, Mao ascribed the surging house price to the rigid baseline, arguing that supply of more land to the housing market would curb the soaring price. His last argument shows who he really spoke for - those housing developers.

Yu Congbao

on blog.xinhua.news.cn

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(China Daily 01/06/2009 page9)