Quotes of the Day

Drivers who brave the northbound traffic on the third-ring road in Beijing crawl past capitalist edifices with names like the World Financial Center. Then comes a red banner strung across an overpass: STUDY LEI FENG. BE A MORAL PERSON. Lei Feng is a relic of China's communist past, a model soldier who supposedly wrote a diary chronicling his selfless, socialist existence before an unfortunate encounter with a falling telegraph pole ended his life more than half a century ago. I guarantee that the occupants of the Audis, Hyundais and occasional Ferraris inching forward in the smog are not receptive to the meditations of a young man who, according to China's propaganda czars, showed his dedication to the People's Republic by shoveling outsize loads of dung.

As China celebrates the Nov. 9 opening of the Third Plenum, by the end of which the country's latest economic blueprint should be unveiled, posters glorifying the Communist Party have proliferated across the country. On the fringes of the Tibetan plateau, I saw a giant billboard that urged locals to "fully implement the scientific development concept to build a rich, strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious" region. Only herds of yaks and sheep were around to consider such an undertaking. At a construction site in a northwestern provincial capital, the motto was even more direct: LOVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY.

Love is a difficult emotion to mandate, even for a party that for decades forced itself into the most private corners of people's lives, dictating everything from their place of work to mode of birth control. Today, China's ruling communists have retreated from many realms — economic, social, personal. So why do they still rely on such clumsy propaganda campaigns? Do they believe their own cant? More important, do they actually think an increasingly wired, sophisticated populace will want to study the habits of model soldier Lei Feng?

Maintaining economic growth and social stability are the main ways for the party to justify its rule. Yet the accompanying propaganda effort is so inept — not to mention steeped in outdated Marxist ideology — that even the state media cringe.

Late last month, a PR exercise backfired when a local government in eastern China was caught Photoshopping a bunch of communist cadres together with an elderly woman at a nursing home. Her tiny figure barely reached their knees. "Manipulated Pictures Reflect the Poor Publicity Skills of Officials," said the headline of a Nov. 1 op-ed in the Global Times, a party-linked daily. The paper also noted the proliferation of social unrest in today's China: "These conflicts are worsened because of inefficient communication between local governments and the people."

Inefficient communication is the least of it. This is an era in which cell-phone photos can circulate globally within minutes, as on Nov. 6 when bombs exploded near a communist office in northern China. Yet the party still tries to impose news blackouts. When an SUV plowed through tourists and erupted into flames in Tiananmen Square on Oct. 28, killing five people, including the perpetrators of the attack, it was kept from the evening news. Internet chat rooms were scrubbed of references to the plumes of smoke that emanated from the symbolic heart of the nation. Yet within hours, on the edge of the Tibetan highlands, more than 1,000 km from Beijing, people knew what had happened.

A couple of days later, the government blamed the assault on ethnic Uighur separatists from China's largely Muslim northwestern Xinjiang region. But lingering questions surround the incident. How is it that the SUV burst into fire yet the police were able to recover banners with radical religious messages from inside the vehicle? Why would a "terrorist," as the car's driver has been dubbed by the Chinese government, take his wife and mother with him on a suicide mission?

Sanitized news reports and overbearing posters only highlight the disconnect between China's masses and their rulers. It is an insult for the citizenry to be told that Lei Feng, that superhuman shoveler of excrement, is the man for today. Nor should they be compelled by a government billboard to adore the Communist Party. The traffic in Beijing — along with the haze of pollution that cloaks the Chinese capital — only gives drivers more time to ponder life beyond the orbit of the Propaganda Department.

• Hannah Beech
• China's leaders are deluding themselves if they think they can block the truth from the people