ENLIGHTENING

The Shanxi provincial TV station has won public praise by premiering a tourism-themed reality game show featuring local officials as contestants and viewers as their ultimate judges. The show aims to bolster tourism in the heavily industrial, coalproducing province. The participating officials, most of whom were provincial mayors or Party secretaries, gave speeches extolling the virtues of their particular city or county in a bid to prove their hometown the “most worthy” of hosting a province-wide tourism conference later in the year. Many netizens praised the move as a “good start” in terms of placing officials on more equal footing with the people they claim to represent.