A government building lit up at night and featuring a silhouette of a woman dancing, dubbed “the stripper light show” by some, has come in for a lot of criticism, but local officials have defended their nocturnal neon show.
Officials in a county in central Hunan Province have been heavily criticized for the unorthodox and racy neon light show they installed on the local government building.
Many call it the “stripper light show” when it comes to life each night on the facades of the government office building in Dong’an County, an economic backwater of some 600,000 residents. A local official oversaw the light show project, which reportedly cost 40 million yuan (US$5.22 million), and insisted the dancing woman was a “martial arts master playing Chinese kung-fu stunts.”
The county’s annal income just broke north of one billion yuan last year and it has been the recipient of aid from better-off coastal cities. Some people commented online that the light show, along with the music, looked a bit “racy” and went against the “solemn and inviolable image of a legal supervision organ,” the Shanghai Daily reported.
The Hunan provincial government has now ordered the county to scrap the controversial light show. Apart from the dancing woman show, other gaffes involving light shows and billboards have led to a backlashes in China.
Last year a county in eastern Zhejiang province made headlines after a short clip of a Japanese porn video was accidentally shown in broad daylight on an LED screen hung above a bustling street not far from a primary school.
After an outcry, local police launched an investigation and detained an intern with the county’s TV and radio bureau. Local newspapers reported that the intern inadvertently linked the LED screen to his personal computer.