A new study has revealed the impact of President Xi Jinping’s belt-tightening measures, with the number of official banquets falling by as much as 50 per cent last year.
Zhang Zhongliang, director of the statistical education centre of the National Bureau of Statistics, showed that Xi’s year-long campaign not only cut down expenditures but also freed up time by “setting officials free” from such obligations.
Zhang read out some findings of the study on the effects of Xi’s eight-point austerity directive at the Beijing-based Communication University of China, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported on Thursday.
He said county-level officials, who typically spend the most time at banquets among all ranks of government, on average attended 12.2 official banquets per week last year, compared to 18.2 per week in 2012.
Zhang said county engagements dropped by one-third, while provincial and national-level officials saw the number of banquets drop by half.
This gave civil servants an average of 30 minutes more with their loved ones, Zhang said.
It was not reported whether the survey was based on reports from bureaus or monitoring by third parties.
At least six different sectors were directly affected by the crackdown on official parties, mainly the catering, tobacco and wine industries, the study said.
Zhang said the catering industry’s growth dropped to 3.8 per cent last year from 8.8 per cent the previous year. The total sales of luxury wines in the mainland market plunged 40 per cent in the same period.
Zhang said these measures partly contributed to a slowdown in the country’s economy but it was “a price that must be paid” to root out corruption.
Extravagance among party cadres drove up consumption in the short-term, but would distort supply and demand in the long run, he said.
via Communist Party banquets cut by half in 2013 under Xi’s austerity drive | South China Morning Post.
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