The Register
Delegates at China’s largely ceremonial parliament, the National
People’s Congress, have been warned to keep their smartmobes firmly in
their pockets during the annual ten-day
snoozefest meeting.
Such
is the temptation to relieve the boredom at the Congress, which does
little more than rubber-stamp decisions already made by the executive,
that attendees are increasingly fiddling with their handsets.
However, according to a report in state-run
Beijing Youth Daily, the organisers have given this year’s bunch the following strict instructions (tr
Quartz):
Do not use your phones to send text messages or make phone calls
during meeting; do not use your computer or phone to play games.
Representatives are not allowed to use means such as Weibo and WeChat to
live broadcast the conference.
The warning should come as no great surprise, given the
Party's paranoid compulsion to strictly stage manage every element of
China's appearance to the outside world.
As such, it wants to
dominate the media narrative by allowing only its own official tweets of
the event and not giving outsiders the chance to poke fun at pics of
snoozing – or even worse, Candy Crush-playing - delegates.
As
Quartz
says, pics taken by delegates have also given bloggers the opportunity
in the past to identify lawmakers wearing expensive jewellery or clothes
which they shouldn’t be able to afford.
In a bid to prevent too
much snoozing at the event, officials are also limiting speeches to ten
minutes this year and have urged delegates to speak without a script in a
“refreshing” tone. Good luck with that.
China is, of course, not
the only place where public figures have been caught doing something
they shouldn’t have with their smartphones.
In 2012, three ministers in Indian state of Karnataka were
forced to resign after apparently watching porn on a mobile phone during a debate in the House.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong this week pan-democrat lawmaker Albert Ho was fined by his party after being
caught browsing pics of underwear models while finance minister John Tsang delivered his 90 minute budget speech.