The Chinese bureaucrats who spent taxpayers’ money on a $700-a-night Las Vegas hotel and visits to Hawaiian beaches and a San Francisco sex show might have gotten away with it if someone hadn’t lost a bag on the Shanghai subway.
The dozens of documents and receipts in the bag, with officials’ names and enthusiastic comments attached, were swiftly posted on the Internet, spreading like wildfire across Chinese cyberspace over the past week. That brought swift punishment for some officials involved — and another disgusted shrug from Chinese citizens all-too-familiar with corruption.
Officials gambling and spending government money on shopping sprees and sightseeing during overseas trips is hardly new. But making the lurid details public certainly is, illustrating the growing power of the Chinese public to use the Internet to expose wrongdoing.
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