Play

Maybe this is why we shut down the Planning Commission in India. In a blatant attempt to get someone other than state-funded economists to care about the massive central planning effort that goes into putting together a five-year plan, state-run news agency Xinhua has posted this trippy video.

"If you wanna know what China’s gonna do, best pay attention to the shí sān wǔ," goes the chorus of the psychedelic music video, with shí sān wǔ referring to the 13th five-year plan (2016-2020). which is being put together now. Other lyrics in the propaganda video masquerading as a catchy song include, "there’s doctors, bankers and farmers, too, and even engineers who deal with poo!”

Comparisons have been drawn to animated videos from the 1970s, others have pointed to the similarities between two of the characters and musicians Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie. The video has plenty of random cutaways, with Albert Einstein, a rubber duck and disembodied lips all making an appearance.

The video was put together by Fuxing Road studio, which has regularly made slick pro-party videos that are then promoted by Chinese state media. Earlier this year there was a video about the Chinese Dream and one about the Chinese connections to Britain. All of them are slickly produced but carry very little sense of irony which allows them to sometimes seem quite silly, at least in how earnest they are.

Just to make that point another sampling of the this-is-how-young-people talk lyrics from the five-year plan video: "It's a huge deal! Like how huge? Huge! Like China huge? Yeah, China huge. Wow, that's really big!" NITI Aayog: Your turn.