China captured the world’s attention last week, for all the wrong reasons. The world’s most populous country and potential future superpower inaugurated a new president and premier. But ask the average global television viewer what happened in China last week and they will tell you that the rivers were full of pigs.

Maybe the average television viewer has it right: 10,000 pigs clogging the water supply of the Chinese equivalent of New York City makes better TV than Xi Jinping’s inaugural address not just because most viewers are shallow and mindless, but because these pigs are pretty important, politically.

Their lifeless bodies – plucked dripping from Shanghai’s Huangpu River or rotting in piles along its banks – capture the simple indignity of life in modern China: poisoned water, tainted food and government officials who cannot be trusted to tell the truth about any of it. In this case, the Shanghai government insists the water supply is unaffected and the pigs aren’t sick (apart from one who had the bad form to test positive for a porcine virus). They may even be telling the truth – but those who believe them in Shanghai are about as thin on the ground as those who can spell Li Keqiang in the Bronx.