David Bowie meets Monty Python in latest Chinese propaganda

At first glance, it’s hard to know whether the video is something achingly ironic or something hilariously funny that hipster pranksters somehow sneaked on to Chinese official media.

Presented by an Aladdin Sane-era David Bowie animated figure, the Song of Shisanwu uses a psychedelic Monty Python-esque style in a song that includes paeans to the Communist Party and scatological humour to sell the message of the 13th five-year plan. The plan was debated and formulated by a party plenum last week and will lay out the government's agenda until 2020.

“If you wanna know what China’s gonna do, best pay attention to the shisanwu,” sing the four warblers atop a VW bus, using the Chinese expression “13-five”, a hip abbreviation for the plan.

Among the experts consulting on the plan for the world’s second biggest economy, “there’s doctors, bankers and farmers too. And even engineers who deal with poo”, the song tells us in the video, which was broadcast on state news agency Xinhua last week.

And, of course, it praises the leadership because “they have to work hard and deliberate”.

Propaganda

Excruciating as this latest attempt to spice up propaganda may be, it is right about the importance of the 13th five-year plan. As growth slows and the gap between rich and poor widens, the plan is expected to make much of the need to build “a moderately well-off society”, stressing the improvement of livelihoods for more people and also focusing on the environment.

In the event the big decision in the five-year plan appears to have been the changes in the one child policy, effectively transforming it into a two-child policy.

Good news for Ireland's dairy industry. Ireland is the second-largest exporter of infant formula to China. Ireland exported 13,100 tonnes of retail-ready infant formula to China in the first half of this year. This equated to about 17 per cent of Beijing's import market for finished formula.

Credit Suisse reckons the new policy will lead to three million to six million additional babies a year in the five years from 2017.

“This means a population boost of 17-33 per cent from the current 16.5 million newborn babies per year, bringing the annual newborn back to the 1990s level,” it said.

This population boost will increase demand in the most directly related sectors: baby formula, nappies, medication, and children’s clothing/ appliances, said Credit Suisse.

Assuming the cost of raising a child at 40,000 yuan (about €5,700) a year, additional consumption will be 120 billion-240 billion yuan per year from 2017, translating into 4-9 per cent of total retail sales.

Sustained growth

Analysts had widely expected the five-year plan to set a growth target. The government is keen for growth to be sustained at about 7 per cent, but in the end the Central Committee appears to be waiting a couple of months to see how the economy develops.

One of the areas of opportunity for Irish companies that could arise from the five-year plan is if it moves to make the yuan a fully convertible currency.

The five-year plan should announce a 2020 deadline to dismantle currency controls that have kept China from fully integrating with global financial markets.

Removing these barriers would force China's leadership to relinquish a key means of economic control, so it's not likely to come easy, and may be axed next March at the National People's Congress when the whole leadership meets.

"The internationalisation of the yuan is going to be a very good opportunity for us," Denis Cleary, managing director, of Fexco's DCC Services said recently on the sidelines, of the Asian Gaelic Games which the Killorglin-based global financial services group was sponsoring.

“One of the products we have is Dynamic Currency Conversion: it’s a bureau de change service on a credit card basically. We’re currently prohibited from dealing in the yuan, so that’s a really big opportunity for us,” he said.