For generations, Chinese families have celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on Monday this year, by coming together under the light of the year’s brightest full moon to share mooncakes, sweet pastries stuffed with fillings like lotus seed or red bean paste whose round shape symbolizes unity.
In recent years, however, the traditional meaning of the holiday has been overshadowed by the frenetic gift-giving that now accompanies it. Many in China’s state-owned enterprises and government bureaus have come to use the holiday as an opportunity to curry favor with officials, bosses and teachers, using public funds to buy expensive and extravagantly packaged mooncake box sets, often shoving all sorts of additional bribes into the packaging. Shark fin mooncakes, mooncakes covered in gold leaf, even solid-gold mooncake-shaped ornaments valued at thousands of dollars have been popular choices.
No longer just a symbol of auspicious reunions, the mooncake has thus become an emblem of the corruption that the Chinese government under Xi Jinping is eager to stop. Last year, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, China’s chief antigraft agency, issued a notice prohibiting the purchase of mooncakes with public funds, resulting in declining sales on the luxury end of the spectrum.
This year, the mooncake-specific crackdown has been even more severe. On Aug. 10, the commission specifically listed this form of gift-giving as a reportable crime, setting up a hotline for tip-offs on officials seen dipping into government coffers to buy mooncakes and calling on the public to do its part in exposing the “Four Winds” of “formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and waste,” according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
September is a month of high alert for corrupt gift-giving practices of all sorts, as the Mid-Autumn Festival closely trails the first days of the new school year and is soon followed by the National Day holiday, also favorite occasions for self-interested “generosity.”
So widespread is the practice that the Ministry of Education issued a circular reminding teachers and education departments at all levels of government not to use public funds to pay for mooncakes, personal vacations or extravagant meals. Acknowledging the less visible forms of gift-giving made possible by the digital age, the notice went on to close all loopholes by banning even electronic gift cards and red envelopes — which contain monetary gifts — sent privately via social media.
Officials who hope to wait out this newly imposed austerity should avoid getting their hopes up, as the secretary of the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection, Wang Qishan, has said that the anticorruption campaign will be in force for at least the next five years, Phoenix News reported on Thursday.
Mr. Wang noted his particular disgust with the mooncake bribery, saying that he had raised the issue at a meeting last month of the Politburo Standing Committee.
“The more mooncakes they make, the more expensive they get — gilded ones, gold ones, ones filled with this or with that, it’s more and more outrageous,” he said, mentioning as well the practice of slipping cash, cellphones and even gold jewelry into the gift baskets. “Mooncakes may be a small thing, but it’s a problem that’s plagued us for a long time.”
All this government negativity toward mooncake extravagance has taken its toll. Purveyors of the pastry, who have seen sales drop sharply, have scrambled to tone down their packaging in line with these more austere times. The head of the Yunnan Food Industry Association, Guo Fusheng, told Xinhua that mooncake sales in the Yunnan provincial capital, Kunming, fell from 6,500 tons in 2012 to 4,500 in 2013 and were expected to fall even further this year.
Gao Houji, the general manager of a mooncake company in Kunming, said in the same Xinhua report that his company’s sales of elaborate box sets were down a third from last year, while sales of cheaper mooncakes had risen by the same amount. His box sets now lean toward the simple and are made “with recycled materials and no deluxe designs.”