This is what I am talking about.
On Monday, Chinese state media Xinhua News released this video on its official Twitter account. The video soon made some headlines across platforms, and most definitely caused some confusions. If you have never heard of the word “Shi San Wu,” no, you are not meant to, because nor did many people who live in China. The word “Shi San Wu” means China’s thirteenth “Five-Year Plan,” (in Mandarin, “Shi San” means “thirteen” and “Wu” means five, straightforward enough, right?). The nation’s first Five-Year Plan started in 1953 and lasted till 1957. The thirteenth one, being promoted in the video here, would start next year and last till 2020.
What does a Five-Year Plan do, you may ask? The honest answer is: nothing. Five-Year Plan is meant to serve as a general direction, a vision, that the country is heading toward. However, since 1953, these Five-Year Plans have steered the country in both directions. Often times, achieving the vision in a Five-Year Plans would mean the success of the plan, but if the reality does not exactly align with the vision of the plan, then nobody would ever hear about it again.
One thing worth noticing is that this video didn’t come exactly at a timely manner. The discussions of this Five-Year Plan started last year among Chinese authorities, and the policy is not going to be in effect until months from now. Also worth noticing is that Twitter is not legally accessible in mainland China, plus the video is in English, it is clear that the target audience of this video is not the mainlanders, but foreigners.
This video attracted a lot more traffic than the account usually receives. By the time this blog is published on Saturday, this video has had more than 300 retweets and more than 200 favorites. Another tweet published by Xinhua News at the exact same time on Monday only had 40 retweets.
Maybe the target audience and the popularity of this video explained why this video did not mention the details of the policy, because for the majority of the people who actually saw this video, they do not live in China, they are not affected by the Five-Year plans, and the specifics do not concern them. Instead, the whole point of creating and publishing a video like this is to stir some conversations on the social media platforms and be able to attract some attention on the national policy outside of the country.
And because of that, I gathered some of the things I saw across the internet this week and checked if the conversations are actually happening. Click here to read more.
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