Hong Kong, July 22: China’s erstwhile supreme leader Mao Zedong used to say that “a revolution is not a tea party”.
For the current generation of Communist Party leaders, however, governance appears to be a rollicking party, funded at public expense, where the alcohol flows freely. Increasingly, however, party officials are learning that this may be a case of having ‘too much of a good thing’.
Last week, Jin Guoqing, a Communist Party official in Hubei province in China, keeled over in the middle of a dinner party he was hosting for guests of the state. At the hospital, the 47-year-old official was pronounced dead on arrival; Jin had died of a heart attack, but state media reports said doctors blamed his poor health condition on “excessive drinking”.
And in Guangdong province, in southern China, Lu Yanpeng a district-level party official slipped into a coma after a similar bout of drunken partying last week, state media reported.
The two similar but unrelated incidents have drawn attention to one of the “occupational hazards” that party officials face in China, given the widespread practice of drinking excessively in the line of work — and on public expense — while formalising business deals.
In fact, things have gotten so bad that government officials are increasingly hiring “drinking assistants” — who typically have a high capacity to imbibe alcohol and who can drink on the leaders’ behalf at social events, thus giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘party official’.
China Daily quoted Li Chengyan, a professor at Peking University, as saying that “ritualised drinking” was”deeply ingrained” in the relationships between government officials. “Drinking with official guests or other officials at alcohol-soaked events is considered part of the job,” and a banquet was a mandatory exercise to welcome VIPs and was usually covered by public funds, he noted.
Last year, a party official in Hunan province, who died of brain haemorrhage after a drunken binge with fellow officials at a karaoke bar, was posthumously given a merit award saying he died with “honour”, media reports said.
Each year, an estimated 500 billion yuan ($73 billion) of public funds was spent on banquets hosted by government officials across China. “It will be extremely difficult to change the drinking culture unless the government legislates against such behaviour,” Li noted.
–Agencies