By RONG REN
Politics Correspondent

All those in favor of rocking this party out till dawn, raise your hands in the air!

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – It’s official! The Seventh Plenary Session of the outgoing 17^th Central Committee will be “even bigger, better and bolder than ever before,” according to early reports.

“This year’s plenary session will be so off-the-hook, I can scarcely wait to create a precise flower arrangement suitably honoring it,” wrote one giddy netizen.

And it’s not just a fan talking about it – officials are excited, too.

“This plenum will surely be the best plenum yet,” insisted plenum spokesman Le Keqiang, who added that he was looking forward to this year’s plenum – scheduled, as usual, for sometime in September, October, November, December or perhaps next year – “with tension.”

But the new plenum has not been without its controversy.

Political turmoil earlier this year saw the shock downfall of Chongqing politician Bo Xilai and his allies, sparking a major leadership split.

Meanwhile, organizers have had to contend with complaints from some critics that last year’s line-up was “flat and inspiring.”

Especially disappointing was said to have been a lackluster vocal performance from the Rural Social Development Panel, led by rising right-wing star Ling Bo, 58.

“They played the usual set without any gusto… it was the same old stuff: reform the household registration system, raise agrarian living standards, yak, yak, yak,” grumbled long-time social-reform advocate Zhu Yipeng, 49.

“Their new material – things about controlling the housing market and capping inflation – seemed derivative to the press and didn’t really get much love from fans, either.”

Peng has vowed to wear a ‘fucking enormous dress’

But a draft version of the line-up for the 17^th Central Committee’s final plenum suggests that officials have taken those earlier criticisms seriously.

Late Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang’s widow, an endearingly popular presence, has been drafted in to open the talks.

Meanwhile, headlining the second day is Peng Liyuan (pictured, left), the popular folk-singer wife of  the expected incoming President Xi Jinping.

The famed soprano, who holds the rock ’n roll rank of general in the army, is said to have a talent for reading crowds, Tang poetry and her husband’s email.

Peng is also particularly well-known for her hugely distracting costumes on stage.

Her syrupy set will feature a pre-approved playlist of “blisteringly mild reformist rhetoric and some nostalgic, leftist classics for the oldsters,” according to insiders.

On paper, at least, the eagerly awaited Seventh Plenum is poised to provide a guideline document for China’s continuing reform and opening-up process, as the blueprint of ongoing socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics– but, experts say, most people just go along to rock out and get messy.

Follow this and other leading China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By Fu Xi
Futurist Correspondent

Gordo: Chang you can believe in (Image: Forbes)

NEW YORK (China Daily Show) — In his famous polemic The Coming Collapse of China (2001), Gordon Chang predicted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would implode within a decade.

Ten years later, Chang admits he was wrong — but blames the calculation on a faulty Mayan calendar.

“It was made in China. What can you expect?” Chang joked.  Now the Sinologist has gone back to the drawing board and come up with an ironclad set of new predictions.

“Depending on which calendar you use, China will collapse in the late half of the twenty-first, according to the Roman, or sometime next century if you believe the one this monk drew up for my astrology chart,” he told China Daily Show.

In his original book, Chang blamed a number of factors – including a spiritual vacuum, religious persecution, over-leveraged state banks and unbridled corruption – and pointed to a military confrontation over Taiwan as the likely tipping point for the CCP’s demise.

But for his upcoming tome Fear of a Yellow Planet (2011), Chang posited three fresh possible doomsday scenarios.

“While superficially China continues to grow,” writes Chang, “the nation faces many structural and developmental issues, as yet unaddressed, that will likely bring disaster in the next millennium.

“These include a vast and growing wealth gap, an outdated and poorly regulated banking sector, an inability to pay basic medical or education expenses, a dearth of graduate jobs, endemic corruption, constant censorship, an ongoing and unstoppable ‘brain-wealth drain,’ as well as chronic pollution and environmental degradation, all fueled by rampant inflation and a relentless provincial focus on GDP growth.

“Add rampant augmentation technology that will render many citizens unthinking lethal weapons and the ever-present threat of the Predator, and it’s a recipe for fresh government.”

In Chang’s chilling second scenario, China’s ruling party will simply decide it’s no longer worth it and wander off elsewhere.

“You first started to see this kind of political ennui  set in when Hu [Jintao] came to power and called off plans to renovate Zhongnanhai,” he said, referring to the Central Beijing eco-dome where most of China’s politicians are bred.

According to Chang, the CCP compound hasn’t been updated since Deng’s day,  its harem is  down to 400 girls from Qinghai and most buildings are in dire need of a fresh lick of paint.

But construction of a new 30-slide water park and brick-for-brick reproduction of Sanlitun Bar Street was halted in 2004, Chang says. China’s cadres are in real danger of growing bone-weary of constantly having to “save” China and its economy.

“Many of them want out. They look at Africa, at places like Niger and Somalia, and think: ‘That’s what I’m talking about’.

“Nor,” Chang added, “is China positioned to take full advantage of the upcoming Singularity.” This concept, beloved among tech-geeks, promulgates scientific advancement reaching such a point in the near-future that  humanity is essentially rendered godlike.

“The increasing speed of technological advancement will see Man transcend mere physical form to live as immortal beings of a digital universe.  But Anhui’s still going to suck.”

Chang’s final throw of the dice is the most likely scenario, and will probably  happen “before 4012.”

“There will be a ‘solipsism failure’ – call it a glitch in the matrix,” Chang postulated. “Everyone will finally become self-aware.

“If none of that happens, though, something else will,” he added. ” Of that we can be certain.”

Follow this and other leading China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By RONG REN
Economics Correspondent

Chinese shoppers patiently queue for salt outside one of Lu's stores this weekend

SHANGHAI (China Daily Show) – “When I said I was quitting university to start my own salt-and-vinegar concern, my parents thought I was mad. They tried to disown me,” smiles Lu Yun, 27. “Now I’m the most filial son in the village.”

Lu was speaking at Sotheby’s Hong Kong’s spring auction, where he paid 80 million yuan for an ornate white-jade  seal that may have been used once by Emperor Yongzheng.

Until just last week, however, Lu subsisted on a diet of instant noodles and thought that the Qing Dynasty was a band.

That was before Japan’s East Coast was devastated by a tsunami and earthquake, causing near-meltdowns at several nuclear reactors and sending Chinese consumers in their droves to supermarkets in search of salt, consumption of which is widely – but erroneously – considered to protect the human body from absorbing radiation.

Iodized salt from Macau and Hong Kong to Beijing, Shanghai and as far west as Xinjiang has since sold out, with prices rising by over 1,000 percent – despite government warnings that consumption increases blood pressure and has no discernible scientific affect on radiation poisoning.

China’s latest billionaire has acquired his new-found wealth practically overnight; in 2003, Lu’s salt-and-vinegar business sold out of every range of vinegar stocked, after locals became convinced the condiment provided protection from the SARS virus.

Lu invested all the family money in huge quantities of salt and vinegar, but by then, the crisis had passed and the vinegar craze was over.

“I was on a stopover in London and very hungry,” Lu recalled the origins of his unexpected success story. “The only thing I could buy at that hour were a traditional English delicacy: salt-and-vinegar crisps.’”

Lu was quickly hooked. He dropped out of college in 2002 and formed a business promoting the dish – but found fellow Chinese didn’t share his passion. Until last week, business for Lu’s ingredients was almost non-existent and Lu faced bankruptcy– but on Tuesday, trade began to pick up sharply.

By the weekend, Lu had sold the company to a Hebei-based conglomerate for a billion-dollar figure, invested in several coal mines, blown a million yuan on a Charlie Sheen-themed KTV-and-mahjong bender and established himself as a serious player in China’s burgeoning art market.

“I will pay any price for my health,” said customer Chen Yueli, 23, who admitted she had previously ignored warnings about tainted Henanese pork, toxic milk powder, recycled hogwash oil and chemically enhanced hotpots but took the iodized salt alert seriously.

Chen paid 2,000 yuan for an iodine-rich salt lick, available for 12 yuan only the day before. She paused to lick off another 50-yuan’s worth of “life-saving” salt, adding, “This shows the Chinese are really starting to understand things better.”

Follow this and other leading China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter

By RONG REN
Politics Correspondent

Foreign journalists are pictured here changing gas prices around the country

BEIJING (China Daily Show) — Beijing authorities announced Friday that recent rises in gas prices were the direct result of interference from foreign agitators, citing journalists and the Internet as the major culprits.

In response to a hike in gas prices of 350 yuan per ton, Ministry of Energy spokesperson Fu Yeng said in a statement yesterday that the government  were not responsible, going on to blame the price hike on a number of other culprits, while declining to go into specifics.

Fu did however add that the news would be unlikely to make foreign headlines because the Western media were directly collaborating on the gas hike.

Bureau chiefs are not the only ones accused of joining what appears to be a worldwide conspiracy to ramp China’s inflation up, a plot that is unconnected to widespread drought and other man-made natural disasters in China, or to the social unrest rumored to be sweeping the Middle East.

Embassies are also involved, says Fu.

“Italy sent 27 pizzas to our Ministry right at the same time as we should have been watching Bloomberg,” Fu alleged.

The gas price hike is hitting citizens hard, and some are taking revenge on the outside world. Xin Mashan, a teacher in a middle school in Shanghai, said that she will never learn or teach anything about other countries ever again as a form of protest.

Xin’s boycott received widespread online attention and has spread across the country, reaching as far as the Ministry of Education’s official national curriculum.

Professor Wang Zhao of Beijing Normal University’s social studies department told China Daily Show that life was much better before the constant interference of foreigners.

“Life was pretty good before open-and-reform,” he sighed. “We had nothing. But we didn’t know we had nothing. Now we realize and it’s all fucked.”

Follow this and other leading China news at @chinadailyshow on Twitter