$540,000 Zhengzhou Tourism Video Features Wrong City
Six-minute promo left residents unimpressed and incredulous at the high price tag.
Fan Liya
Jun 04, 2018 3-min read
An official promotional video for Zhengzhou — the capital of central China’s Henan province and home to Shaolin-style kung fu — has come under fire for questionable quality at a phenomenal price.
The six-minute video was released on social platform Weibo last Tuesday, but eagle-eyed locals quickly spotted a blooper: A scene identified as Zhengzhou Garden Expo Park in fact showed Millennium City Park, a famous tourist attraction in the neighboring city of Kaifeng.
The Zhengzhou Municipal Tourism Administration said in a statement Friday that it would demand an explanation from the production team.
Though the two parks feature similar traditional architecture, netizens were especially flabbergasted when they found out that the video had cost millions of yuan. According to Beijing Youth Daily, Zhengzhou’s tourism administration invited bids in March, and the following month private media company SinoMedia Holding Limited won with a 3.48 million-yuan ($540,00) offer.
Above: A screenshot from the promotional video shows Millennium City Park in Kaifeng incorrectly labeled as Zhengzhou Garden Expo Park; below: An aerial view of Zhengzhou Garden Expo Park. From Weibo, VCG
“A promotional video costs over 3 million yuan? I must come from the countryside,” commented one netizen in surprise. In a reply to Beijing Youth Daily on Friday, a SinoMedia employee acknowledged the mistake but said that the budget for the project also covered three other short videos.
Financial newspaper National Business Daily found that Zhengzhou boasted the country’s second-largest budget for tourism promotional videos, based on figures made public in the last six months. Shanxi province was the biggest spender at 7.8 million yuan.
As cities around the country compete for tourists, talent, and investment, promotional videos are an important way for them to show off their strengths and specialties. Some Chinese provinces and cities have even screened their promos as far afield as New York’s Times Square, following the lead of a national tourism promo that aired there in 2011.
An agent at Chinese company Gen Media, which has made videos for the city of Hangzhou in eastern China, told Sixth Tone that promos are often criticized for ****geneous content and for showing too little of ordinary people’s lives. But with costs ranging from several hundred thousand yuan into the millions, he said, the most common gripes have to do with their price tags.
Last year, officials in Shenmu, a city in Shaanxi province, were forced to answer to the public after netizens questioned why the government had spent nearly one-third of its spending in 2015 on just two promotional videos. But the deputy director of the city’s tourism administration simply said that the city needed higher-quality videos to help boost tourism.
In response to questions about its budget, the Zhengzhou tourism administration said in Friday’s statement that the bidding for the project had been handled by a third party, in accordance with laws and regulations.
Editor: Qian Jinghua.
(Header image: People enjoy a light show at Qianxi Plaza in Zhengdong New Area, Zhengzhou, Henan province, Dec. 30, 2017. VCG)
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