Drinking lessons

Slides
Photos

Drinking lessons

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-10 09:05

How many lives have to be snuffed out before we bring to a halt the notorious tradition of drinking too much at business or official banquets? The death of a village head because of an overdose of liquor during the weekend has once again brought the question to the fore.

The Party secretary of the famous Xiaogang village in Anhui province, where the country's rural reform was initiated, is at least the third official to meet such a fate this year. The other two were local government officials in Hubei and Henan provinces.

It is a long-standing tradition for the Chinese to drink excessively at banquets, considered a way of showing sincerity. Sometimes, one needs to frequently down glasses of liquor to seal a business deal.

To be fair, some officials have become addicted to alcohol after imbibing copious amounts at banquet after banquet. And there have been many scandals involving drunk officials.

Last year, the Party secretary of the Shenzhen maritime bureau was dismissed from office for molesting a girl who showed him the way to the restroom in a local hotel after he had drunk too much. Another official was reported to have boxed a doctor in the ear and kicked a nurse in her leg in a hotel.

In another case, a village head kicked up a row at the county government seat by smashing the gate of the compound and bit a police officer in the hand when the latter tried to stop him from making further trouble.

Some local governments have regulations which ban drinking during work hours. But a lot more needs to be done to have effective mechanisms prohibiting governments at various levels from squandering public money at banquets under various guises.

The disclosure of its 2008 expenditure by a city in Shandong province shows that the spending on meetings and banquets by its nine departments was in excess of 6 million yuan ($882,000), more than 13 percent of their total annual expenditure.

In the trial of a corrupt official last month, the more 440,000 yuan of public money he had spent on eating, drinking and visiting entertainment venues was recognized as booty he had embezzled.

Some officials take it for granted that it is not a crime to squander public money in eating and drinking unless they pocket the money. Chen Tonghai, former general manager of China National Petroleum Corporation, who was given a death sentence with a reprieve of two years for corruption, reportedly spent 40,000 yuan a day in eating, drinking and other entertainment activities.

So there is a connection between excessive drinking by officials and the lack of effective mechanisms to stop them from frittering away public money on banquets. It is not just the matter of wasting public money, the decadent lifestyle will also undermine the government's credibility and deliverance of clean and honest governance.

(China Daily 11/10/2009 page8)