China’s dry economic planning has become the latest beneficiary of a makeover from the country’s propaganda machine, with a chirpy theme song and psychedelic music video.



The state-run news agency, Xinhua, posted an animated clip that explained the country’s 13th “five-year plan”, a roadmap being discussed by Communist leaders in private this week.

In the slickly produced three-minute video, four characters travel through a green and fuchsia dreamscape atop lily pads, the Great Wall and a Volkswagen camper van.

“If you wanna know what China’s gonna do, best pay attention to the shisanwu,” they sing in the chorus, using the Chinese words for “13-five”, an abbreviation for the forthcoming blueprint.

A rubber duck, disembodied lips, a mixtape, a disco ball and Albert Einstein make appearances in the video, with a 1970s aesthetic. Mannequins sporting light bulb and teddy bear heads are also featured.

Released in English with Chinese subtitles, the song’s rhyming lyrics showcase an uncharacteristically tongue-in-cheek humour. Among the contributors to the five-year plan, it said: “There’s doctors, bankers and farmers, too, and even engineers who deal with poo!”

The video is attributed to the mysterious Animation Studio, which has a history of producing glossy clips for China’s ruling Communist party aimed at foreign audiences.

Wanna know what China's gonna do? Best pay attention to the 十三五! See why it matters https://t.co/SgBls5S35A — China Xinhua News (@XHNews) October 27, 2015

Little is known about Fuxinglushang, which could either mean “the road to rejuvenation” in Chinese, or be an indirect reference to a street in Beijing where the state broadcaster China Central Television has an office.

A promotional video it made on the “Chinese dream” – President Xi Jinping’s catchphrase – depicted an “ancient and youthful country”. The people depicted in the video hoped for “a pretty wife” and “bluer skies”, while clowns on scooters handed out roses to smiling young women. It concluded: “The Communist party of China is with you along the way.”

In a five-minute 2013 short entitled “How leaders are made”, the studio depicted Xi undergoing training like “a kung fu master” in order to become president, while his US counterpart, Barack Obama, climbed to power on a mountain of dollars.

But official attempts at capturing the hearts of foreign audiences sometimes fall flat. In September, the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist party, released a short English-language video entitled “Who is Xi Dada [Uncle Xi]?” in anticipation of the leader’s US visit. Eyebrows were raised as a parade of exchange students extolled him as “handsome” and “cute”.

Even so, production values have improved in recent years. When Xi’s predecessor visited the US in 2011, a billboard in Times Square, New York, was festooned with pictures of Chinese celebrities unfamiliar to Americans audiences.

By contrast, in the latest film a David Bowie lookalike sits atop a dinosaur, rhyming colloquially: “Every five years in China, man, they make a new development plan.”