The Guardian, Tuesday November 29, 2005
As China prepares to host Miss World for
the third year running, Fraser Newham investigates how the communist party has
embraced the pageant as a vital political
tool
wo billion people are watching by live telecast,
and American Miss World hopeful Nancy Randall
is about to address the world in Chinese,
a language notorious for its embarrassing
pitfalls. "I love you, Sanya!"
she says in Mandarin to the camera. "I
love you, China!" The all-smiling anthropology
graduate from Louisiana pulls it off. Around
the auditorium, grey-suited party cadres
break into applause, and the home crowd ripples
with delight. If this is diplomacy, it's
honey-coated - and when this Saturday the
Chinese resort of Sanya once again plays
host to this year's Miss World final, all
involved will be hoping for plenty more of
the same. 
Miss World is
the largest live annual TV event on Earth,
and this year's contest will be the
biggest in its 55-year history. And with
memories still fresh of the mass
rioting in Nigeria in 2002, when the contest
was forced at the last minute to
move to London, Miss World may just have
found a home in Sanya, the principal
resort on Hainan - the subtropical island
tourist chiefs like to call
"China's Hawaii", and to which
the contest is returning for the third
successive year.
The country's feminist groups may grumble,
but there is little doubt that overall the
Chinese are very happy hosts. The 115 contestants
have been in China for weeks. The first stop
on an ambitious month-long tour was the east-coast
city of Wenzhou, an economic pace-setter
but not a spot that tends to figure on tourist
itineraries. With state media in hot pursuit,
the girls visited a market, toured the local
beauty spots and served as bridesmaids in
a surreal televised mass wedding. The city's
senior official, Mayor Xu, even stepped up
to help judge the first of this year's fast-track
qualifying rounds, the talent show.
This represents a massive change in attitude,
says Wang Zheng, an associate professor at
the University of Michigan, who grew up in
Shanghai. "After the famine of the early
1960s, the official media began to promote
a more frugal lifestyle," she says.
"Simplicity was seen as a virtue of
the proletariat, and there was an emphasis
on 'proletarian style' - army uniforms or
peasants' and workers' outfits. Everything
else was condemned as bourgeois." ............
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1652983,00.html
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