Thought the Oscars and the 12th National People’s Congress had nothing in common? Think again. This week, as movie stars were making fashion headlines at the biggest film event in the world, a Japanese reporter at the NPC drew attention for his NPC-themed hairstyle. For five years in a row, this reporter has arrived at the NPC with new — and relevant — designs etched into his hair.

From 2010’s hammer and sickle to China’s stars in 2011 to 2012’s “warm,” it’s hard to say whether the designs are political or merely meant to reflect current topics at the NPC. Certainly, last year’s “PM 2.5” could be seen as a critique. But if nothing else, this year’s “dream” (梦) demonstrates some truly amazing hair-buzzing skill.

(H/T Tom Phillips)

It’s the political season in China, with the dual National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) swinging into annual two-week sessions. The period is normally a huge gift-giving event and a tremendous boon to the luxury goods industry. Businesspeople hoping to curry favor with officials shower them with preposterous presents, from overpriced cigarettes to “Gucci handbags, Hermès scarves, Montblanc pens and $30,000 diamond-studded Swiss watches” so ostentatious they would make Kim Kardashian blush, as New York Times reported a few years back.

But vigilante netizens have begun to expose the conspicuous consumption of particularly brazen officials, and top leaders seem increasingly concerned about the light such tawdriness casts upon the supposedly communist ruling party of a very unequal country. They’ve banned public spending on luxury goods, and more recently, according to CNN, stopped “advertisements for luxury products on… official state radio and television channels,” a move that immediately lowered the share prices of Burberry, LVMH, Richemont, and Chow Tai Fook (a Hong Kong-based jeweler that seems to specialize in huge pieces of gold).

Between official anti-corruption and frugality campaigns, luxury gift-giving might appear to be down this year, but some expect “the gifts to eventually be given, but very carefully and only once the campaigns slow down,” as Bill Bishop writes. All of this makes this blogger reflect that, Bourdieu notwithstanding, if China’s aristocracy had not been completely wiped out by revolution, perhaps there would be someone around to point out how ridiculous and unnecessary all this is.

Classism is nothing to be blasé about. Ethically and economically there is nothing more antithetical to human progress than the idea that who your parents are is more important than who you are and what you have accomplished. At the very least, however, old money helps expose conspicuous consumption for what it is, the lurid exhibition of wealth. The ultimate guide to American old money, The Official Preppy Handbook, for example, recognizes that wealth is not for flaunting: “Mummy may have inherited a king’s ransom in sables, but she prefers to wear her four-year-old ski parka.”

While this ethos of not flaunting one’s wealth seems sadly absent from contemporary Beijing, it was evident in the scholar-gentry class of Imperial China. The scholar-gentry prided themselves in, for example, having the good taste to prefer simple and elegant Tang Dynasty writing implements to newer and flashier gilded ones. But the Cultural Revolution and the harsh equality of the Mao years put an end to that. This means that there was no old money class to provide an example for the nouveau-riche. Couple this with nearly three decades of double digit GDP growth and you have the perfect recipe for mixing “expensive first growth Bordeaux with Coca Cola.” Obvious parallels could be drawn with the situation in Russia.

Of course, “good breeding” hardly prevents corruption. But the overconsumption of ostentatious luxury goods fuels graft by forcing Chinese officials to keep up with the Zhangs. A cornerstone of combating official corruption is to make sure that civil servants receive adequate salaries that provide a secure, if plebeian, middle-class lifestyle. This does not happen in China, where top leaders earn around $22,000 a year and judges (crucial targets for corruption) in China’s poorer inner provinces make as little as $2,000 a year. But if Chinese officials feel the need for yet one more $15,000 Swiss watch, then not even substantial salary increases would allow them to live within their means.

In the Qing Dynasty, wealthy Manchu princes, considered somewhat useless as they possessed neither the horsemanship of the Manchu solider nor erudition of the Chinese official, were known as the “children of the Eight Banners (八旗子弟).” Today, the term is sometimes used to refer to the Princeling Party (sons and daughters of communist high officials) whose increasing dominance of China’s politics puts them at the heart of ostentatious corruption. But at least the Manchus would have had a class of scholar-gentry to look down their noses at princelings speeding around Beijing in $260,000 Ferraris.

John Wagner Givens is a researcher at Louisville’s Center for Asian Democracy and contributor to The Durian. He also writes for the Huffington Post and tweets @JWagerGivens.

Although the skies were conveniently blue for the first day of the National People’s Congress on March 5, by the next day the AQI was already creeping back above 300. In an interesting twist, a prominent member of the National People’s Congress has criticized the Chinese government for its anti-pollution efforts.

In an interview with Shenzhen Evening News published yesterday, Chinese Academy of Engineering scholar and NPC delegate Zhong Nanshan, 77, who rose to fame in 2003 for his work during the SARS crisis, said he hopes the government will start paying as much attention to pollution levels choking our fair city as it does to GDP.

We just saw a panel of delegates refuse to answer a female reporter’s question about the environment — perhaps she should have asked Zhong, who has conducted research into the true scale of Beijing’s pollution problem:

The Beijing Municipal Health Bureau’s 2010 tumor prevention report reveals that the lung cancer rate among Beijing men has reached 76.57 in 100,000, while the breast cancer rate among Beijing women has reached 48.6 in 100,000. “Pollution rates are highest in the Chaoyang, Fengtai and Shijingshan districts and lowest in Miyun and Huairou.” Zhong fears that if this level of pollution continues, the number of cancer patients will increase astronomically.

“People have no natural defense against pollution.”

Zhong also hit back at China’s national oil companies for claiming that national standards are too low and that they aren’t to blame for the current crisis. “So we can’t make any international comparisons?” Zhong asks. “Does internationalization not come into it at all?”

Zhong believes the environment should be used as an indicator of government performance. Although GDP is a clear indicator of economic progress and living standards, priority should also be given to the environment: “When basic actions like eating, drinking and breathing become an issue, what good is having the highest GDP in the world?”

Naturally, he finishes on an inspiring note.

“When the Chinese people come together, there is nothing we can’t achieve,” he says. “If the government acts now and people give up their polluting habits, we will see a real difference in the next 10 years. Hopefully I will still be alive to see it.”

Will it ever actually happen? You decide.

Robynne is a writer, translator and Chinese graduate living in Beijing. She tweets @frommyplate.

(H/T John Hanrahan)

The environment is everyone’s concern, because we all live under the same sky — in Beijing, often a dark, dirty one, rife with health hazards. It’s our collective duty to take care of it, but what can anyone — an individual, particularly one with power — do to spur a collective response against man-made threats to our natural world?

What would they do?

That’s exactly the question one reporter — described by local media as a “foreign journalist” — posed to a panel of delegates at a National People’s Congress press conference on Wednesday. Watch a clip of the inquiry above, and the response — specifically, the lack thereof.

The excellent English subtitles are provided by Liz Carter, a frequent contributor to Tea Leaf Nation who blogs at A Big Enough Forest.

“I am also very concerned about environmental problems,” the unnamed reporter says. “So I want to ask every delegate — because every time this question is asked to an individual, we all say, ‘Well, that’s not under my control.’ Now, if we think about things in a different way, if I just think, if I were the minister of the enivornment, if I, myself, were the environment minister, if I wanted to improve air quality, well, what could I do?”

“Everyone has to breathe this air,” she continues. “If you could somehow live here and avoid that, that would be some kind of magic, right? So it’s because every person, work unit, and company must, by necessity, face this problem — that is to say, if we solve this problem soon, won’t everyone have a chance to be healthy, won’t we have a good environment?

“If we all take responsibility, and commit to one purpose, if I said, ‘At my work unit, we must have X number of cars, employees show up at 8 and work for X number of hours, if I can’t allow for any changes, if that’s how things are, can we change our environment?”

She goes on for a bit longer, then gets emotional through this next part.

“We always say we must, absolutely must develop economically. But I believe GDP and the environment are connected. Even if our GDP is zero, but if we are able to solve environmental problems quickly, I think this would be a great accomplishment for officials. Right? And even if we grow by 15 percent, but our environment was already so terribly polluted, our lifespans would be shortened, our living bodies would be in pain, at that point, what good is having a lot of money?

“I think this is a problem for everyone.

“Now, let’s look at it from a different angle: can’t we do anything in our professional capacities? Because everyone says, that’s not my problem. Coming here to ask these questions, I haven’t ridden in a car, I’ve taken the subway the whole time.”

She ends abruptly. The delegrate running the session, the newscaster tells us, said “she just answered her own question.”

In a way, by not caring to reply, the delegate answered her question, too.

Wen Jiabao gave his final speech before the National People’s Congress on Tuesday among a crowded room of delegates, then bowed three times to the audience and took his leave. At the end of the 12-day session, he, Hu Jintao and other party leaders will step aside as new leadership takes the reins, led by Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang as the new president and premier.

Despite criticism and a dip in popularity, Wen’s speech was, as always, measured and tactful. (Or as the Los Angeles Times’s Barbara Demick put it: “He read a 100-minute statement that was dull even by the standards of the country’s soporific political theater.”) The 100-minute speech set the stage for the incoming leadership, putting forth topics the new administration hopes to tackle in the coming year, particularly social issues, though he stopped short of addressing corruption. There are those who hoped to hear more on environmental reform to curtail serious problems like smog and pollution, but these issues received a cursory and vague mention.

“We should adhere to the basic state policy of conserving resources and protecting the environment and endeavor to promote green, circular and low-carbon development,” Wen said.

On other social issues: “We must make ensuring and improving people’s well-being the starting point and goal of all the government’s work, give entire priority to it, and strive to strengthen social development.”

More than half of the speech focused on accomplishments over the last few years. This long list, which turned tedious, fell on deaf ears. At one point, Mr. Wen went so far as to mention “31 airports and 602 shipping berths for 10,000-ton ships were built.”

He also focused on the economy, after seeing the country’s slowest growth in 13 years. “To expand individual consumption, we should enhance people’s ability to consume, keep their consumption expectations stable, boost their desire to consume, improve their consumption environment and make economic growth more consumption-driven,” he said. Consumption, consume, consumption, consumption. Is it any wonder that this happened?

Premier Wen is speaking. These men (CPPCC delegates, I think) are snoring: twitter.com/markmackinnon/…

— Mark MacKinnon/马凯さん (@markmackinnon) 2013年3月5日

Sources: LA Times | Reuters | BBC | NY Times

The Xinhua News Agency is reporting that sources say Hangzhou mayor Shao Zhanwei, a deputy at the 12th National Party Congress, died of a “sudden illness” in Beijing this morning.

All other details are sparse, but another report identifies the sudden illness as a heart attack.

It was just yesterday that Shao spoke about Wen Jiabao’s work report speech and mentioned the need for “strengthening the foundation for the development of agriculture and rural areas and promoting the integration of urban and rural development.” He added that promoting urban and rural integration should be the starting point of town-building.

More details as they come in.

(H/T George Ding)

Few will accuse Hu Jintao of being photogenic (note: some have tried), but the above picture takes the cake. By Jason Lee of Reuters, captioned via Yahoo: “An attendant serves tea to China’s President Hu Jintao (L) next to China’s Communist Party Chief Xi Jinping (R) during the opening ceremony of the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 5, 2013.”

Poor Xi Jinping, who must be wondering if 10 years at the heart of China’s political machine will also turn him into an emotionless husk of a walking dead. We wish Hu Jintao well in his post-political career. There’s still a human being somewhere in there.

The Two Sessions is upon us once again, “formulat[ing] policies that have significant impact on the world, foreign experts say,” according to Xinhua.

You know what else foreign experts say? Watch the above. Note: it’s all in Chinese.

Additional note: all the Two Sessions fun you can handle, here. By “fun” we mean you can literally do anything else and have more fun. For example: try seeing how many correspondents you recognize in the above vid.

Foreign journalist at the NPC & CPPCC (Sina)

Hey look, a Mo Yan sighting.

It looks like the floodgates have opened as far as interviews, too. It wasn’t long ago that his first interview since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature was published by Der Spiegel.

Members of 12th CPPCC National Committee arrive in Beijing (Xinhua via Global Times)

“Highlights” from the 2012 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference are after the jump. I just want you to know I nearly lost an eyeball to my own prying fingers while compiling this. Unless otherwise noted, links (plus above picture) are via Global Times.

We’re going to start with the good stuff. This article is a surprisingly candid ground-level perspective as told by reporter Xuyuan Jingjing. And here’s James Palmer and Tom Fearon’s recap of interesting stories. Zhang Xiaomei’s proposal to extend public heating to the south actually makes sense (her proposal to change “Women’s Day” to “Woman’s Day” isn’t as useful, I think). And holy shit, yes!

“The most detrimental factor is that society as a whole offers minimal encouragement to youths, who are educated to be merely obedient,” said Xi Yingjie, director of the China Youth and Children Research Center on Friday.

Uh, but no (from same article)…

CPPCC members who pressed for the educational reforms cited renowned 30-year-old blogger and writer Han Han as a role model for China’s future innovative minds.

“There are many ways for a person to succeed. I don’t think Han Han is a rebel,” Zhong said.

However, Zhao Lihong, president of Shanghai Literature Magazine Press, said Han Han’s success could inspire other youths to follow in his footsteps.

Now the schlock:

Li Xiaolin wants to open “morality file” on all citizens “to hold them on a leash,” seems oblivious to the small irony of saying this while wearing a $2,000 suit. [Danwei]

Zuo Zongshen wants CCTV to broadcast Diaoyu Islands weather, even though no one lives there. [China Kaleidoscope]

I can barely bring myself to type the words Lei Feng, so here, here he is, again, on a cross, which is a telephone pole, because he died when a telephone pole fell on his head.

Mao Zedong did not leave a very, um, slim grandson. [Caixin]

“Scholar” wants to ban bilingual education in kindergarten:

Ling [Zi], a CPPCC member, is also a scholar devoted to the promotion of traditional Chinese culture and language. In her proposal, she says that starting foreign language education for young children is “highly inappropriate.”

Just in case you were confused:

“I have done the research. None of the CPPCC members hit by the rumors possesses a foreign passport, and the other people mentioned are not CPPCC members,” Zhao Qizheng, a spokesman of the CPPCC, said during an online interview with umiwi.com.

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Poop.

China’s courts dealt with implementing the judgement of 2.557 million cases in 2011, of which 2.394 million were concluded, Wang Shengjun, president of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), said in a report on the work of the SPC at a meeting of the ongoing annual parliamentary session.

China’s other national nightmare, the National People’s Congress, concludes tomorrow.

Via Ministry of Tofu

Overheard at the National People’s Congress:

- Is he dead yet?

- Mmm.

- Is he dead?

- I think so.

- How can you tell?

- I don’t know.

- Check if he moves.

- None of them move!

- I don’t know, check if he’s breathing

- Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

- How can you tell?

- Ah hell, who gives a shit?

"All together now: Cheeeese!"

This is so rich.

"Oh my God, quick, it's Chinese Ambassador to Ethiopia Xie Xiaoyan!"

"Fuck your SLRs. My point-and-click rules!"

"You, sir, are one good-looking midget."

"Too cool... for school."

"Just kill me now."

Ouroboros, anyone?

"Merciful God, kill me now."

More Faces of Near-Death — all via China Daily — after the jump.

"Shit fuck balls cunt shit fuck balls..."

"I'm going to fire my stylist."

"Hey, um... down in front?"

"Bob, are you even sure we're supposed to be here?"