By Fu Ren
Crime Correspondent
CHONGQING (China Daily Show) – Following the removal of two of China’s leading crimefighters, an exasperated public has turned to Batman for help in the endless fight against corruption.
“Only a tortured playboy, whose parents were taken from him at a young age and who then swore to fight back against the very thing that stole them, can save us now,” said one exasperated Chongqing resident.
Last night, however, 24-year-old Bo Guagua was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of the Bo-mobile, a gleaming red Ferrari often seeing racing to the scene of an urgent date.
Bo’s faithful manservant, a paternalistic Englishman known only as Neil, has also not been sighted for many months, neighbours say.
“Guagua cannot be Bruce Wayne of China,” said a nearby resident. “Bruce Wayne was just a billionaire who lead a callow life of non-stop partying, a clever subterfuge for his secret existence. But he never received any scholarships.”
In China’s Gotham City, Chongqing, the mood is ugly.
Corruption is rife, with many top officials saying they won’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 yuan. A police crackdown in 2009 led to hundreds of arrests for graft; one former mayor is said to have had 8,000 iPads buried under his garden pond.
“No one needs that many iPads,” observed a senior prosecutor.
But Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun, the gangbusting pair who both swore to break the city’s mafia stranglehold, have since vanished – believed snatched by arch-nemesis “the Party.”
Earlier this months, thousands of citizens took to the streets to demand Batman’s help. Many say that only an anonymous and unaccountable figure, such as Batman, would be suitable to enforce proper rule of law in China.
The country has not had a proper vigilante since the golden days of the Maoman, an obese hero said to have been “faster than a speeding rickshaw and able to swim the Yangtze River in a single stroke.”
Maoman’s urgent 1950s purges rid the streets of many citizens – some of whom might have been criminals at some point, experts say. Chongqing citizens say they need the Maoman or his ilk back.
“A tough-talking out-of-town cop, whose maverick style bent the wrong noses out of shape?” one taxi driver told our reporter. “I don’t know who this ‘Commissioner Jim Gordon’ you speak of is –but that sounds a lot like Wang Lijun.”
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