Cut and Paste

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China's 68 million Communist Party members have spent the past few months attending self-criticism meetings to address their personal and professional shortcomings as part of Party chief and China's President Hu Jintao's "Education Campaign of Maintaining Party Members' Advanced Nature." But the exercise isn't taken as seriously as it was during the Cultural Revolution, when self-criticisms could involve public humiliation or worse; these days, some cadres are finding it easier to download sample texts from websites like dangyuan.cn and submit them as their own. A few excerpts:

"Sometimes when I watch TV or read newspapers and magazines, I see corruption stories and I am really angry. But afterward, all the passion and rage drain out of me and I don't have the appropriate feeling of pain in my body. I totally forget that I myself am a Communist Party member."
—For a government official

"Although I care about international and domestic affairs and actively participate in Communist Party activities, I study other things in a passive way. In my leisure time ... I rarely study Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Three Represents."
—For a student

"Given our emphasis on putting people first, I found it more practical to be humane, give my staff more benefits, increase their incomes and to solve their problems such as housing, employment, schooling, health and social insurance instead of merely talking about the usefulness of Communism."
—For a media official