MCLC: China's 'most famous peasant' dies

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China's 'most famous peasant' dies
***********************************************************

Source: Danwei.com (3/19/13):
http://www.danwei.com/chinas-most-famous-peasant-dies-and-he-never-appeared
-on-the-cover-of-time/#more-7984

China's 'Most Famous Peasant' Dies
By Barry van Wyk

What’s a little embellishment of a famous man after his death? Chinese
newspapers today note with sadness the death of a man that became known as
“China’s most famous peasant”, Wu Renbao (吴仁宝). Wu was the man
responsible 
for transforming little Huaxi village in Jiangsu into a prosperous city of
35,000 people: China’s “leading village under heaven” (天下第一村). Wu died
last night at the age of 85 of lung cancer, and his face is on the front
pages of many newspapers today (scroll down to see gallery).

The newspapers today mourn the passing of the man with fulsome praise, yet
when Xinhua broke the story on Weibo
<http://ndnews.oeeee.com/html/201303/19/35748.html> last night just after
six in the evening, it reported that Wu had appeared on the cover of
Timemagazine in 2005. Hence today this same assertion is included in all
the newspapers’ coverage of Wu, making it all the more regrettable that
this assertion simply isn’t true. New News (新消息报) from Qinghai province
even kindly printed said Time cover with Wu Renbao, which is actually a
blatant fake that compounds the embarrassment of Xinhua and the newspapers
today.

Wu Renbao and China’s “first village under heaven”

Huaxi village (华西村) in Jiangsu province was established in 1961 with an
original population of 667 people. When Wu Renbao (吴仁宝) took over as
Party 
Secretary of the village, it had assets of 25,000 yuan and debts of 15,000
yuan. Yet under Wu’s energetic leadership, the village began construction
and investment projects to develop the village and the surrounding
countryside. From 1978, Wu oversaw the development of a unique Huaxi-style
investment model where profits were re-invested and shares were
distributed to all residents of the village.

The outcome of all this was visibly astounding. Huaxi is now a prosperous
town of 35,000 inhabitants with skyscrapers and luxury cars. It has even
started to flaunt its wealth: in 2011, a 328-meter high-rise hotel
<http://www.chinawhisper.com/skyscraper-in-china-richest-village-sparks-con
troversy>housing a statue of an ox made from a ton of gold was opened in
Huaxi. The man said to be behind the “miracle of Huaxi” was Wu Renbao. In
2012 a movie <http://www.chinawhisper.com/10-best-chinese-movies-of-2012>
was made about his life and achievements in transforming Huaxi. Entitled
simply “Wu Renbao”, the movie was made as a “gift” to the 18th Party
Congress last year.

The Time cover that wasn’t

In their fulsome praise of Wu Renbao today, China’s newspapers all mention
that he made the cover of Time magazine in 2005. So I went looking
<http://search.time.com/results.html?
N=46&Ns=p_date_range|1&Nf=p_date_range%7cBTWN+20050101+20051231> through
all the covers of Time magazine in 2005 and came up empty-handed. It was
then, however, that I discovered that the newspaper New News (新消息报) from
Qinghai province had kindly printed the said Wu RenbaoTime cover,
inadvertently revealing that it and all the other Chinese newspapers had
been embarrassingly duped by a blatantly fake Timecover. It boggles the
mind how this newspaper didn’t notice its terrible mistake, with the fake
cover being such a nut job of nonsensical grammar. The fake Wu Renbao
cover, it emerged, was in fact ripped off of this
<http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060116,00.html> Time cover from
January 2006. This fakery has already been reported on Weibo today (e.g.
here  <http://www.weibo.com/1893801487/zo8LSErc7>or here
<http://www.weibo.com/1226668235/zo8qY4bjK>), and elsewhere
<http://ndnews.oeeee.com/html/201303/19/35748.html> on the Chinese
Internet.

Yet before we completely dismiss New News as a sorry excuse for a
newspaper, it would probably be remiss not to mention that this snafu (as
with everything else related to Chinese news reporting) was likely first
propagated by Xinhua itself. Looking back at the paper trail of news
reports yesterday, it does appear as if Xinhua was first
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/2013-03/18/c_115070230.htm> with publishing a
story of the news of Wu’s death and the claim that he appeared on the
cover of Time magazine in 2005 in a report published at around 20:30 last
night. As mentioned above, Xinhua had already reported the false assertion
on its Weibo account just after six last evening.

Inexorably in China, all news leads back to Xinhua, and then all the rest
follow.