A middle-aged local government official kissing a document outside the mainland's top planning agency has been among the most popular online pictures in the past few days.
The picture, showing how ecstatic the official, Wang Zhongbing, was at receiving approval from the super-powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for a steel plant project in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, caught the public's eye. It was a reminder of the increasingly important role of economic planners, and of China's excessive reliance on investment - sometimes to problematic industries - to combat an economic slowdown.
Wang, deputy party secretary and mayor of Zhanjiang, raised the NDRC approval document above his head on May 24, posing for a local party newspaper which dedicated seven out of its 16 pages to celebrating the realisation of a '34-year-old dream'.
The steel project, with a projected investment cost of 69.68 billion yuan (HK$85 billion), is expected to have annual output worth 200 billion yuan, doubling local gross domestic product and creating employment for 70,000 people, or one per cent of the local population, according to the Zhanjiang Daily, the local party mouthpiece.
Zhanjiang officials first dreamed of the project in the 1970s. About a decade later, the Guangdong government submitted a construction application to the central government. But the project was then shelved for more than 10 years as Beijing decision-makers decided there was already overcapacity in domestic industry. Efforts by Zhang Dejiang and Wang Yang, the former and serving party secretaries of Guangdong, helped revive the project later. But when it was just getting started, the global financial crisis hit in 2008. Concerned at slumping world demand, China called a halt to the project, the local paper said.
With mainland economic growth cooling faster than expected in the first quarter, to 8.1 per cent year on year, Beijing has shifted its stance from combating inflation to focusing on 'stabilising economic growth'. Given that exports are unlikely to turn around soon, and domestic consumption is not expected to grow strongly, investment is a quick and easy solution to driving growth.