ZHU BINGKUN HAD THE SURPRISE of her life on Sunday. Imagine: you’re an animator for The Beijing News, one of China’s most (even now) respected commercial newspapers. Shortly after Spring Festival, you return to the office and find a new job waiting — to design a graphic video elucidating the government’s accomplishments since its annual work report last year.
You put in long hours with your design team, the bunch of you often dragging yourselves to breakfast as soon as you go off shift. You’re burning the midnight oil along with your colleagues at China Daily Online, because the client . . . Oh, did I mention your client? Your three-week project is for the General Office of the State Council — for China’s government, in other words. The client wants results “quite urgently.”
You do the job, of course. You’re all professionals. The result is a short mobile-ready video, two minutes and 50 seconds in length, including 32 slides that summarize the government’s accomplishments over the past year.
March 5 comes, a Sunday like any Sunday. You crawl out of bed, check the news on your mobile . . . And there it is, the animation video you worked so hard to get right. Only it’s not just anywhere. It’s being shared directly with delegates to the National People’s Congress and its advisory body — the richest 100 of which are all dollar billionaires (but let’s not talk about that) — through a scan code on the cover page of the government work report itself.
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