Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Bikini Protests The New Chinese Way

'Asian beauty'? Or 'student with too much time on her hands'?There's a growing trend in China: often when some young Chinese want to raise awareness of a cause, they tend to take off their clothes. No - seriously!
First I read about a no-panties protest on a subway to save the environment, then naked push-ups along the Great Wall...now bikini-clad girls sweeping the streets to protest power plants.
So what ARE they trying to say?Four Chengdu uni students (whose beauty was compared by local reporters to the famed hot spicy flavours of the regional cuisine) gave a 15-minute "performance" near a local power station. In just bikinis and gas masks, they swept the streets with straw brooms, protesting three serious levels of air pollution emitted by the plant. The gas masks represented the poor air quality; the flesh-revealing bikinis, the vulnerability of the human body; and the brooms signified sweeping the power plant out of town. Not surprisingly in this repressed country, the protest gained alot of attention, even if most passersby didn't understand what the silent protest was all about!
Hmmm...I always assumed scantily-clad girls were most effectively used to sell beer and drape themselves over new-model cars! The Chinese might be on to something here: sex + important social causes = lots of thought-provoking attention, right? Well, lots of attention anyway...
And does the silliness of the approach also cunningly insulate it from potential consequences via the powers-that-be? It's probably easier to break up a controversial protest based on screams and slogans, rather than one based on belles in bikinis. I mean, would you really want to roll a tank over a bunch of babes? Really?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hahaha, "would you really want to roll a tank over a bunch of babes?"

That rules. Thanks for the laugh. CA, USA.