China may well have saved the ocean's sharks with it's crackdown on officials spending thousands of RMB on lavish dinners to impress their friends, and now
sales of mooncakes are about to be hit as the austerity drive targets the all important Mid-Autumn Festival Mooncake Giving Extravaganza.
Mooncakes, usually boxed in outlandish packaging, are a traditional foods that's eat around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival. To fully understand the important of the mooncake, which is a small round pastry with various fillings, ranging from the utterly disgusting (beef and peanut) to the bland (egg whites), one need only take a look at the number of scandals that have risen up in their name.
In 2011, news footage played on the Beijing subway routinely shows police smashing fake mooncake gangs as
8,000 boxes of fakes were discovered in Guangzhou. The following year,
another gang used mooncakes from 2011 (hopefully not from the same Guangzhou batch), put them in new packaging - complete with a few dead cockroaches - and sold them at a discount. Such was the scale of the operation that a police raid on the factory recycling the cakes took an epic seven hours, and the goods confiscated filled five trucks.
Whether the crackdown on expensive moon shaped snacks this September 19th will increase the sales of dodgy mooncakes as officials continue to face scrutiny over their expenses remains to be seen. The last thing China needs now is a
Mooncake Scandal on top of everything else.
