An undated photograph circulating on the internet in China appears to show a slide from a presentation at the Guangdong Province Party Committee School’s Institute of Public Administration, listing the “Ten Commandments for Leaders“:
- Don’t speak nonsense, gibberish, bunkum, or balderdash during interviews
- Don’t smoke expensive name-brand cigarettes in public
- Don’t wear luxury wristwatches during business engagements
- Don’t drink expensive alcohol during routine social engagements
- Don’t make the forearm jerk during grassroots inspections
- Don’t blithely plagiarize in writing for publication
- Don’t smile when visiting disaster areas
- Don’t post to Weibo about your appointments
- Don’t journal about sowing your wild oats
- Don’t take on the role of press spokesperson during an emergency
There is precedent for these “commandments,” some from the early days of Weibo (2009-2013). For example, the admonishment against expensive watches recalls Yang “Watch Brother” Dacai, a Shaanxi official with a collection of nearly a dozen. In August 2012, Yang was caught grinning at the scene of a deadly traffic accident. He was swiftly removed from his post and sentenced to 14 years in prison. The year before Yang’s fatal mistake, an official in Jiangsu, Xie Zhiqiang, mistook Weibo for a private messaging service, inadvertently chatting publicly with his mistress about hotel arrangements. In 2013, a leaked sex tape earned 13 years in prison for Chongqing district Party secretary Lei Zhengfu.
It is unclear why this photo is making the rounds right now, though there is a timelessness to officials embarrassing themselves.
Read the original post at CDT Chinese.
Translation by an anonymous CDT translator.
