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Early in January, jibing with the Western New Year spirit and no
doubt thinking of the soon to start Year of the Pig, writers in
China’s state news agency Xinhua announced the fascinating news
that scientists had successfully bred partially green fluorescent
pigs.
In China’s popular culture (and
in serious Taoist religious observance), the pig is one of the 12
animals that govern the Zodiac and thus the lives and destinies of
human beings and societies.
The Xinhua report said a team of
agricultural scientists in Harbin’s Northeast Agricultural
University was hoping that their accomplishment would be a boon to
stem cell research.
Scientists in Manchuria
Harbin (Ha Er Bin) is in
Heilongjiang province, one of China’s northeastern provinces (the
other two are Jilin and Liaoning) which Westerners and Japanese used
to refer to as Manchuria. In World War II, the Japanese colonized
Manchuria and turned it into their puppet state, Manchukuo.
What the research scientists did
in Harbin was inject a green protein—genetic matter from jellyfish
that glow in the sea—into the womb of a sow and thus into her
embryos. Three of these when born had mouths, trotters and tongues
that were fluorescent green under ultraviolet light.
But stranger things subsequently
happened to the Year of the Pig.
The Wall Street Journal Asia
reported in its January 26 to 28 issue “Pigs Get the Ax In China
TV Ads.”
The article by WSJA’s Gordon
Fairclough in Shanghai and Geoffrey Fowler in Hong Kong tells us
that in deference to the sensibilities of Muslims, “China’s
Central Television, the national state-run TV network, banned Nestlé’s
ad—and all images and spoken references to the animal [the pig] in
commercials, including those tied to the Lunar New Year, China’s
biggest holiday.”
Multiethnic society
“The intent: to avoid offending
Muslims, who consider pigs unclean. ‘China is a multiethnic
country,’ the network’s ad department said in a notice sent to
ad agencies late Tuesday [January 23], ‘To show respect to Islam,
and upon guidance from higher levels of the government, CCTV will
keep any ‘pig’ images off the TV screen.’”
China has more than 20 million
Muslims, but this is only a speck in the total population of more
than a billion.
Nestlé had planned to ring in
the Lunar (Taoist) Year of the Pig with the rest of the non-Muslim
Chinese population by putting out TV commercials, the WSJA article
said, “featuring a smiling cartoon pig. ‘Happy new pig
year,’” the ads would have said.
Fairclough and Fowler’s article
continues that, “Suddenly, companies reaching out to China’s
booming consumer market have a pig problem. The edict has sent Nestlé
and others scrambling to adapt to the last-minute rule change,
altering spots that had included pigs.”
Big pork eaters
“For most other Chinese, the
pig has powerful and positive cultural associations as one of the 12
signs of the Chinese zodiac. Year of the Pig decorations already
festoon cities and villages all over China.
“Pork is the meat most widely
consumed by the country’s Han Chinese majority. On average,
Chinese annually eat more than 80 pounds of pork, according to
United Nations statistics. At banquets in southern China, people
often roast whole pigs, decorated with blinking red lights in their
eye sockets.
“Tens of millions of people
have been born in the year of the pig, which occurs every 12 years.
People born under the sign of the pig are believed to be happy and
honest. Astrologers say this year is held to be especially
auspicious for new births.
“Pigs symbolize prosperity and
good fortune as well as fertility and virility. “Pigs are fat and
they mean good luck,” says Miao Saiwang, a spokesman for the Bank
of China, a commercial lender. In some areas this year, the bank is
using the slogan: ‘Golden pigs bring good fortune.’”
There was also apparently a
recently emerged political reason for the anti-pig TV ad ban. For,
the AWSJ writers tell us, it “comes in the wake of the killing of
18 Muslims by police in the country’s remote northwest earlier
this month. The government accused the men of being terrorists.
Muslim activists have called for an independent investigation.”
Rule-changing
Last-minute rule changing by the
government is one of the things businessmen also complain about in
the Philippines. At least in China, the changes are often occasioned
by government efforts to do something socially relevant for the good
of the state.
Early in communist-ruled
China’s movement toward a market economy and less repressive
society in the late seventies the government allowed temples to
reopen. Taoist worship of every kind of gods and guardian-protectors
is held in the strict Maoist-Leninist ideologue’s view as
counterrevolutionary superstition. Confucian ancestor worship in
that view is even worse. During the Maoist Cultural Revolution,
whenever communist ideological hardliners tried to attack the wiser
members of the leadership, such as the late premier Chou Enlai, they
wrote veiled taunts in essays alluding to him as a new Confucius.
--R. Q. Bas
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