Star wanes for mooncakes in drive against extravagance
Print Edition
Luxury mooncakes — the cost of which were guaranteed to lead to raised eyebrows across the country — are a rare sight ahead of this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, due to China’s anti-extravagance campaign.
“This year, few people are interested in mooncake gift packages worth 500 yuan (US$81) or more, while large-scale orders by government organizations are hardly seen anymore,” Li Aihua, owner of an online mooncake franchise shop in Chengdu, capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province.
“Normally, we would have sold mooncakes worth half a million yuan by now, but this year we have only netted tens of thousands of yuan,” complained Li.
The popularity of luxury mooncakes took a dent after the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection met last week.
The CPC’s top disciplinary arm called for efforts to fight the “four forms of decadence” — formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance.
Practices such as giving gifts or holding banquets using public funds around festivals — such as the forthcoming Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on September 19 this year — must be restrained, said a statement after the meeting.
Disciplinary bodies have been urged to tighten supervision and the enforcement of discipline, alerting the entire Party through exposing and punishing those who do not adhere to this.
Disciplinary bodies at provincial levels have banned the use of public funds to give gifts, in a bid to improve the working style of government agencies.
“These measures are an extension of the ‘eight-point rule’ announced earlier, and the mooncake market has been affected consequently,” said Xiao Jinming, a Shandong University law professor.
China’s CPC leadership, elected at a Party congress last November, introduced an “eight-point” rules to fight bureaucracy and formalism late last year, urging CPC officials to reduce pomp, ceremony, bureaucratic visits and meetings.
The government should introduce more systematic and tangible measures to eradicate corruption behind extravagant behavior, according to experts.
Xiao said the government needs to further prevent and punish corruption in the guise of gift-giving.
More importantly, gift-giving using public funds must be stopped, said He Zengke, deputy director of the government innovation institute at Peking University.
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