The Key to Living a Life of Love, Peace, and Prosperity is to Live From Your Heart

To review and build a bit on the Chinglish theme that I've been posting about lately, there are many instances of pop culture here in China that I'm posting about because they are at turns unexpectedly poetic, delightful, weird, or even eerily haunting.

And then there's the stuff that's Just Plain Wrong:



(Yes, that's me, Mister "everything is culturally relevant" Dave, saying that...)

These bucolic scenes are from advertisements plastered onto the walls that surround one of the countless gated housing complexes that are springing up everywhere in the former farmland that surrounds our university.



The countryside nearby is equally surreal - vacant fields gone to seed, piles of rubble that I imagine were once farmhouses, and brand new roads that now lead nowhere. Below, some construction workers' laundry hung out to dry on improvised bamboo racks under a new power line.



Who gets to move into these new gated communities? Who gets left out?

When we search for the "Key to Living a Life of Love, Peace, and Prosperity," why do we so often come up with such misguided solutions?