Advisors clash over proposed 'symbolic city'
By Wang Shanshan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-11 07:17

NPC deputy Chen Yunying, wife of Lin Yifu, the World Bank's chief economist-designate, is interviewed yesterday in Beijing. Chen and other deputies from the Taiwan delegation reviewed the work reports of the top judge and prosecutor. Huo Yan

Political advisors disagreed yesterday over a proposed "Chinese cultural symbolic city", to be built in Chinese philosopher Confucius' hometown of Jining in Shandong province at an estimated 30 billion yuan ($4.12 billion).

The cultural project was initiated by 69 scientists who are academicians at either the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2004, and approved by the National Development and Reform Commission last October, CPPCC National Committee member Sun Shuyi said.

Speaking at the CPPCC convention on Sunday, Sun proposed that the central government pay for the project's cost of 30 billion yuan - about twice the cost of the Beijing Olympics - and make the city a venue for national ceremonies.

Covering 300 sq km, the city will include a large square, a memorial hall for prominent figures of Chinese history, a museum for the country's cultural relics, the headquarters of the Confucius Institute and dozens of other related structures, the project's website stated.

Sun, who is also chairman of the CPPCC Shandong Provincial Committee, saw his proposal being echoed by a number of NPC deputies and CPPCC members from his province.

"The 'city' will contribute to China's `soft power' and its construction should become one of the nation's key cultural projects," Geng Jiahuai, an NPC deputy who is also board chairman of the Yanzhou Mining Group, said yesterday.

Many political advisors also spoke against the proposal.

Hou Lu, a CPPCC member and president of the Anhui Dramatists' Association, said: "I was not able to stay seated when I listened to Sun's speech. I am a taxpayer and I don't want my money to be spent in this way."

She has written a proposal against the project and it has been co-signed by a dozen political advisors.

"I will not be able to face my people at home if I remain silent at such a thing," she said.

Liu Qingzhu, a leading archaeologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who is also a CPPCC member, said that Jining has no major archaeological finds to prove itself as the right place for such a "symbolic city".

"Jining is covered under Neolithic Dawenkou Culture, one of the origins of Chinese civilization, but it is not at the core of that," he told China Daily yesterday.

Scientists may not be the right people to propose the construction of such a city, he said.

"I don't know of any historians who have spoken in support of the project, and I really think that the government should give a list of who the 69 scientists are," he said.

Song Zhenhao, a CPPCC member and historian at CASS, said the government should put more money into the conservation of cultural heritage assets, such as the former residence of Wang Yirong in Jining. The 19th-century archaeologist was the first to discover the 3,000-year-old oracle and bone inscriptions, the origins of Chinese writing.

(China Daily 03/11/2008 page5)