OPINION: banal political slogans - the bad and the ugly
Stuart Heaver wonders where the people who coin slogans such as China's 'One Belt One Road' get their ideas from, and why they think we need everything boiled down to six words or less
I am tired of banal political slogans, repeated interminably as sound bites, as though we are all too stupid to comprehend more than six words at a time, on any subject of public interest.
Of course, being in China, we are privileged to have a long tradition of inspirational slogans from our illustrious leaders. "The Great Leap Forward" is an obvious contender for most inaccurate campaign title of all time - as history proved, the push turned out to be a great leap back. The name of the "Let 100 Flowers Bloom" campaign of 1956, which encouraged dissenting opinion, had a poetic quality that masked the plot's true intention. The less romantic "Have Fewer Children and Raise More Pigs" at least got to the point, in 1979.
No one really knows what the current favourite, "One Belt, One Road", means, but it does evoke romantic notions of sailing junks and camel trains building Chinese economic hegemony while plying their trade across Asia and beyond. It's just unfortunate that the translation of the slogan is reminiscent of the idiom "belt and braces", which raises the possibility of officials' trousers falling down unexpectedly.
Of course, China does not have a monopoly on oversimplified sound bites. The British excel in dull slogans, such as Prime Minister David Cameron's inspirational "Britain Living Within its Means" presumably with an offshore tax haven.