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Chinese blogger points to luxury watches as sign of corruption
An eagle-eyed Chinese internet activist has raised questions about the rampant corruption in China after spotting countless senior Chinese officials apparently wearing wristwatches they could not possibly afford on their official salaries.
The search of online picture archives revealed officials wearing watches by Rolex, Piaget, Omega and Cartier each worth several thousand pounds, and in many cases equivalent to half the annual salary of just £10,000-a-year for an official of ministerial rank.
Most embarrassing of all were pictures of China's new railways minister, Sheng Guangzu, who according to the research was photographed wearing watches worth a total of 400,000 yuan (almost £40,000) in a series of pictures dredged up from Google Images.
Among the glittering timepieces identified by the activist when he zoomed in for a closer look at Mr Sheng's wrist were a Rolex Oyster Perpetual DateJust worth £7,300, a Paget Altiplano worth £7,000 and an Omega Constellation worth nearly £3,000.
Mr Sheng, a former head of Customs in China, was only appointed in February after the previous railways minister Liu Zhijun, was arrested and investigated for corruption, with reports in China's official media alleging he had taken up to £95m in bribes.
Also on his list was a vice-minister of health spotted with a Rolex Submariner worth £9,200 and the vice-principal of State Administration Academy in Beijing, which trains civil servants, wearing what looked very like a Piaget Emperador, worth more than £10,000.
The Chinese public reacted angrily to the pictures, sharing barbed comments via Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of the Twitter microblog platform.
The activist, operating under the pseudonym "Huaguoshan Zongshuji", or "General Secretary of the Flower and Fruit Mountain" – an illusion to the anti-authoritarian Monkey King in the classic Chinese novel 'Journey to the West' – has now fallen victim to China's online censors.
Communicating via Weibo, he told The Telegraph he had been inspired to carry out the searches after July's Wenzhou rail disaster in which 40 people died, provoking a public backlash over corruption and corner-cutting in China's high speed rail boom.
In one photograph taken at the time of the accident railway minister Sheng, 62, is seen wearing his £7,000 Rolex while one of his deputies, Lu Dongfu, sports a lesser model valued by the activist at nearly £5,000.
Originally Huaguoshan Zongshuji had uploaded a 48-page PowerPoint presentation of the officials and their watches onto his Weibo account, but he said that access to the files had since been blocked by Sina's censors.
"Strictly speaking, they were not deleted, but just shielded from public view," he said, "I myself can still see them, but others cannot." The censorship is at odds with the sentiment of a commentary published by the official Xinhua news agency last weekend which appeared to encourage Huaguoshan Zongshuji, arguing that the fight against corruption "should follow" his method.
"A simple watch can reveal the hidden corruption of some greedy officials and it shows that corruption leaves its mark," it warned.
China's leaders call frequently in public for tougher measures against corruption, which is endemic after 60 years of one-party rule in which the Communist Party, unchecked by a free media or independent courts, controls access to vast amounts of public spending.
However analysts say the anti-corruption campaigns are self-limiting, since the Party has to walk a dangerous line between giving the public confidence they are tackling corruption while not fatally undermining their own credibility by exposing the true extent of official theft.
Huaguoshan Zongshuji, like many other online activists in China, complained about the 'asymmetry' of information, in which the Chinese state holds vast amounts of information on private citizens but gives little away about its own spending and personal wealth of officials.
In an attempt to cutback on wasteful public spending, government departments were required last July, for the first time, to declare their spending on cars, trips and receptions, however only half complied with the directive.
"If the government is concerned about adverse public opinion, the fundamental way to resolve this is to publicise all officials' assets," said Huaguoshan Zongshuji, repeating a popular sentiment on China's internet, "the information we have on each other [citizens and government] should be symmetrical."