One Chinese official is dead and another in a coma in a pair of cases highlighting the risks of China’s culture of drinking heavily to seal political or business deals, state media said yesterday.
Jin Guoqing (金國慶), a district water resources chief in the central city of Wuhan, died last week of a heart attack after drinking excessively while entertaining official guests, Xinhua news agency said.
Also last week, Lu Yanpeng (陸燕朋), a district chief in Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province, fell into a coma after drinking heavily during a dinner with a Communist Party official, it said.
They were just the latest casualties in a booze-soaked culture in which officials and businessmen are expected to ply guests with strong Chinese liquor at elaborate banquets amid cries of ganbei.
Xinhua quoted an official in Shandong Province, who asked to remain anonymous, as saying officials would “lose face” if they do not get guests drunk.
“Neither my guests nor I want to get drunk but we have to play under the unspoken rule, which has been around for so long. We don’t know how to do business otherwise,” the official said.
Some officials and business executives specifically hire secretaries who are able to drink heavily so that they can bear some of the load, the report said.
Amid growing outrage in China over the flamboyant lifestyles of some government and Communist Party leaders, a number of cities have in recent years banned such binge drinking at lunchtime.
Xinhua said about 500 billion yuan (US$73 billion) in public funds is spent each year on official banquets, nearly one-third of the nation’s spending on dining out.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
‘LIMITING MYSELF’: New Zealand’s foreign minister said that the omments by Phil Goff were ‘disappointing’ and made the diplomat’s position in the UK ‘untenable’ New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the UK has lost his job over remarks he made about US President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said yesterday. Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the UK, made the comments at an event held by international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday. Goff asked a question from the audience of the guest speaker, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen, in which he said he had been re-reading a famous speech by former British prime minister Winston
RSS